i just finished reading the Sunday Times and its feature article Google’s China Problem (and China’s Google Problem).

it is an interesting piece which explains how the Chinese government is censoring the Internet. They basically have a Great Firewall that is enforced on all sites outside China. So anytime a user in China is accessing the Internet beyond the Chinese border it goes through the Firewall (which uses a blacklist as well as a keyword base censorship).

For sites that are ran within China, with local servers the government is making the site operators to sign up for a vague self-censorship policy, that leaves a lot of room for the people running the site to interpert what they should and should not censor. the penalties for not enforcing the policy can be harsh, and arbitrary.

it sounds a bit liberal. using a vague policy. but it is the other way around. by leaving it vague and letting the companies police themselves, the government is instilling fear. you never know whether you crossed the line, so you’re always in panic and you will probably take an even more extreme position, censoring even stuff that would have been ok with the government.

this is a big challenge for the foreign companies. and the major portals have taken different stands on the issue. it seems Yahoo! is the worst. complying readily with the censorship, and giving users’ information to the government (which in the past year lead to 2 arrests of journalists/bloggers).

Microsoft is taking the same approach as Yahoo!, but to date has not been involved in providing users information (i assume they were not asked..).

Google has launch google.cn, which is a censored version of google.com, but is not offering gmail, gtalk and blogger, in order to not be in a position where they may be required to give away users information, or participate in active users censorship. whenever they censor search results they inform the user that the search results have been edited to comply with chinese laws.

the latest news are regarding Skype (which has partnered with Tom.com to offer skype in china). and a weekend report by the Financial Times suggests that Skype is censoring the text messages sent on their system.

in my opinion Google took the most honorable approach. it avoided getting into the business of offering services, which may put them in a position that they will be required to cooperate with the government in issues that may lead to arrests, and it provides a disclaimer, which is in my opinion is very important, since it basically tells the user “the government does not want you to see this stuff”.

the US Congress actually called Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and Cisco to testify in Washington about their Chinese policies. i watched some of the hearing at the time (a couple of months ago), and typical to these type of hearing the congressmen where more interested in sounding smart and getting quoted in the papers, than in the real issue. so they resort to superficial arguments that means nothing.

i am still reading the “clash of civilzations” (i am taking my time with it), and it talks about the rise of Asia and China specifically, and about issues such as modernization, democratization and westernization (too much “zation” for a sentence..). it is my belief that the Internet will have a profound effect on China, and that the next generation of the growing middle class and the leadership will be very different thanks to the Internet.