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 The often acute and astute Hiawatha
Bray, technology correspondent for the Boston Globe, weighs in
with a decent general overview of the thorny, bleeding edge issue of
Chinese Internet censorship, and the complicity of US technology concerns
therein.
Representative Christopher H. Smith, a New Jersey
Republican and chairman of a House subcommittee on human rights,
plans to hold hearings next month on reports that US Internet companies,
including Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp., aid efforts by the government
of China to suppress free speech. The issue has simmered for years
as American companies have raced to enter the Chinese Internet market,
already the second-largest on earth and rapidly growing.
Another example of how persistent new media attention
can eventually move an issue into the mainstream of political and old
media attention. Berkman’s own Rebecca
MacKinnon, among many others, have been trying to draw attention
to this key frontier showdown with implications for the future form
and function of the emerging Global OmniWeb for some time. Some of
the key questions raised by the intense and ongoing efforts of the
world’s #2 Internet power to control how its citizens access and interact
with the web:
- Is it logistically possible to control the online activities of
over a BILLION potential users? If they all jumped off chairs onto
the same URL at exactly the same moment, would it knock the web out
of its orbit?
- Do US corporations have a legal and or moral obligation to comply
or refuse to comply with requests/instructions from foreign governments
for access to information or technology there is reason to believe
will be used against citizens of those countries in ways which would
be considered human rights violations?
- Could US corporations actually affect internal Chinese policy
in such a sensitive area merely through restricting licensing and
service contracts?
- Could a general, industry-wide, consensus virtual embargo on the
internet activities of an egregiously wanton violator of human rights
or supporter of terrorism, be it China or some other, effective isolate
a pariah state and "keep it off" the OmniWeb?
- Could a Super-State like China, soon to be the #1 user base in
the world by far, actually create a viable alternet (alternative
internet)?
In play is nothing less than the shape of the future.
In the future we will all be spending significant portions of our life
in cyberspace, which we will be able to access anywhere, anytime. Some
people, kids being born today, will probably spend most of their conscious
time online. What will that experience be like? What will it look like,
where will it let you go, how much will it cost? Who gets to say? The
current Chinese case involves all that and more.
It is the first key issue of the new Geo-Politics
of the 21st century – cyberspace geopolitics. You can bet your bottom
dollar that the US government has a top secret, multi-disciplined team
studying what the Chinese government is doing, what works and what
doesn’t, both technologically and politically, in terms of large scale
monitoring and spying on one’s own citizens via the internet. No telling
when that kind of information might come in useful, eh?
What is emerging in the shadows as we fart and fiddle
our way around the Blogosphere is an entirely predictable Gibsonesque
cast of characters, black ops government geeks, teenaged wizards creating
virtual marvels and imploding spectacularly, high-level, high-tech
military-industrial conspiracies, data pirates and identity wholesalers,
and covering it all, the unavoidable hall of mirrors that is the media.
So keep a close watch on the actions of the Chinese
Government, and the US Senate, and corporate America on this one. It
involves not just Darth Gates and IBM, but liberal icons like Google,
which dropped news sites disliked by the Chinese government. It very
much involves the shape of things to come.
from the Boston Globe
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