In late July, café and bar owners in Nanluoguxiang were summoned to the Jiaodaokou Police Station and presented with an option: either stop offering Wi-Fi to customers, or shell out ¥20,000 for government monitoring software. As of August 1, they were told, fines would begin to be issued to violators—¥5,000 for a first offense, ¥15,000 afterwards.

[See our earlier coverage on the new Dongcheng Wi-Fi regulations]

Most venue owners were indignant—it doesn’t take a math whiz to realize you have to sell a lot of coffee to make back that kind of money. “I’m sure they know as a bar owner we will not pay ¥20,000 for this special server,” says Stephanie Rocard of Mao Mao Chong, who was present at the meeting. “The police actually said ... ‘we understand it’s a lot of money, [but] we have nothing to do with this.’”

It seems even the police aren’t even thrilled about the new rules. So far, the regulations have only been introduced in Beijing’s Dongcheng District, but Beijing News reported that they would eventually be implemented throughout the country, and China Daily confirmed that some venue owners in Shanghai and Hangzhou have also been told to log off.

Always ready for a China censorship story, the New York Times quickly filed a piece, saying the new regulations suggest that “public security officials … remain undaunted in their efforts to increase controls.”

But are they really? Within days of the first reports, dissenting voices began appearing in, of all places, the state media: “Businesses, public pan Wi-Fi monitoring,” read one headline in China Daily. Meanwhile, Global Times dug up data on the software provider, Shanghai Rainsoft Company, suggesting that it was actually based outside the Chinese mainland and thus ineligible to sell a sensitive product like web monitoring software. And in a stroll through Gulou in mid-August, we saw many customers with computers accessing the internet at a slew of cafés. Although it’s harder to get a connection in Dongcheng lately, we’ll wait and see whether the new rules take hold.