China's internet: A giant cage

As I was reading this, I kept thinking, Is this a satire of the American government? But no, it was just some jingoistic piece singling out one foreign country.

I accept that the Chinese government is terrible. It's the incredulous "it would never happen in The Free World™" tone of the article that pisses me off.

Do people believe the government doesn't shut down or freeze individual sites at will? Been on 4chan today?

Do people really believe the Chinese government has jailed more people for expression on the Internet than the United States government? Do people believe the U.S. government isn't monitoring or manipulating the Internet? Back doors? Warrantless surveillance? Lurking? Subpoenas for user information without so much as a judge's signature? FISA? NDAA? CISPA? Does the FBI not track people or pay personal visits to people who say the wrong thing on Facebook or YouTube or any other social site?

I know we can express more here in the United States than people can in China, but I really think the feds are using the entire Internet as one giant honeypot right now, and the lid's just waiting to come down. We know the FBI collects information on non-criminal activities both in the real world and on the Internet in the event that those activities become illegal in the future. (Gore sites, for example, are being watched. It's not illegal to post gore. But when it becomes illegal, the FBI will have a list of all those people who posted on the clear Web.)

Do you know how easy it would be for the government to shut down the entire Internet in America? You have a few wireless operators, all heavily beholden to the federal government. You have a few cable and telco monopolies. Their executives and board members are all interchangeable, all part of the same sphere of influence — essentially a telecommunications cadre. This isn't accidental.

I say 10 friendly phone calls from the federal government could get 90 percent of the Internet shut down in this country inside of an hour.

Anyway, they haven't done it here yet. But that's about the only thing that distinguishes us from them.

I think that part of their success is because China a non-religious tyranny.

Muslim countries can't do it because of their hypocritical nature they try to ban and regulate everything, including things not related to regime's survival. They set absolutely unrealistic bar and never hit it.

On the other hand, Chinese regime is very pragmatic. They offer their internet where they only change a little. This they can do without making the whole thing unusable.

Have been living and working in China since 10 years. This article is a good typical case of China misunderstanding. Example:

> Chinese private internet companies, many of them clones of Western ones, have been allowed to flourish so long as they do not deviate from the party line.

There is not one party line that everyone follows, this was true 30 years ago but isn't anymore. What we have is a blurry moving red line delimiting the topics that will trigger censorship.

Germany and France also have censorship. The difference is in the protected topics, the number of them and the blurrynesss of the lines.

I think that in the overall scheme of things having a limited internet is better than no Internet. Having said that I think the chinese peope should strive for a fully free Internet in china. I know easier said than done.. While working with engineers in China they had FB, which they would access through vpns. And proxies. Hopefully the day would come soon when do wouldn't have to resort to that or fear of the consequences of what they write.

The Chinese and other regimes have done much scarier things than simple censorship by leveraging the power the Internet gives them:

http://www.ted.com/talks/evgeny_morozov_is_the_internet_what...

I might buy the Economist this week to read the rest of this report (it seems this was only the introduction).

As someone who has spent a decade or so in China, I believe that practically speaking the most obvious measure of control to anyone on the ground inside of the country (and one that is not mentioned in the article) is bandwidth limitation.

Quite simply, international links are huge lossy choke-points that make international services so painful to use that you may as well clone one inside the country... which will be more readily legally threatened and manipulated by the state. Combined with purposefully weak intellectual property law, this in and of itself is a masterful extension of soft power by the party.

(PS. The map of internet penetration statistics looks to me to be largely bullshit. Internet penetration for urbanites is far greater than 100%, with the average urban family having at least one internet-connected cellphone each, more than one tablet device, etc. In smaller areas, people tend to use internet cafes more often, which hides true penetration statistics.)

Given how old, large, and diverse the entirety of Chinese culture is, if it takes 50 years for the Internet to gradually open up their society and system of government, it's still a big win. I view it as a matter of time, not if.