The Filtered Future: China's bid to divide the Internet

[KamaAina]

This is scary stuff -- and not just for the Chinese. You know there are people over here who secretly envy them and would implement Chinese-style censorship in a heartbeat. :scared:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2122270/

The end of June marked the deadline for independent Chinese bloggers to register with the government. That requirement is another sign, along with Microsoft's recent admission that its Chinese blog site would block titles like "freedom" and "democracy," of the country's efforts to control the Internet. In the United States, the mainstream assumption is that such controls are easily evaded and will do little to slow China's inexorable march to democracy. The country's leaders are "digging the Communist Party's grave, by giving the Chinese people broadband," writes New York Times columnist Nicolas Kristof. "There just aren't enough police to control the Internet."

Kristof is right that China's blogging rules can be sidestepped by experts. But what he and others overlook is a larger assault on the identity of the Internet itself. The Web was conceived as one global medium, by its nature open and free. But countries like China are pushing hard to divide that global network into a system of Balkanized national networks. Censorship of the sort Microsoft acceded to is grabbing headlines, but the more important restrictive measures are taking place quietly—and quietly succeeding....

Another Chinese attempt at control involves the Internet's physical infrastructure. Within China, the Web looks more and more like a giant office network every day, centralized by design. Last month, China announced its latest build-out—the "Next Carrying Network," or CN2. This massive internal network will be fast, but it will also be built by a single, state-owned company and easy to filter at every step. Its addressing system (known as IPv6) is scarcely used in the United States and may make parts of the Chinese Internet and the rest of the world mutually unreachable. While such things are hard to measure, Internet maps suggest that, powered by projects like CN2, growth in China's domestic bandwidth is rapidly outpacing the speed of its international connections. Networkwise, China will soon be like a country with a great internal transport system but few roads leading in or out. The goal is an inward-looking network that is physically disconnected from the rest of the world....

China's long-term vision is clear: an Internet that feels free and acts as an engine of economic progress yet in no way threatens the Communist Party's monopoly on power. With every passing day the Chinese Internet reflects that vision more closely. It portends a future for the Web that we're only beginning to understand—one in which powerful countries refashion the global network to suit themselves.

Great. They're about to twist Al Gore's Internets into just another arm of the MSM. They must be stopped. But how?

Note that Microsoft is a$$-deep in this. Linux, anyone?

[Beaver Tail]

1. About the onnly thing i dissagree with is

regarding IPv6.

This is a logical step forward as ther current version of IP (know as IPv4) is running out of addresses. The internet sooner or later will have to make the step to IPv6 before we run out of IP addresses.

[acmejack]

2. Spot on!

IPv6 is a good thing!

[bpilgrim]

5. IPv6 lept out at me, too... it's where EVERYONE is heading, anyways

but china's network controls are only a tad bit tighter than AOL's but just as bad as M$'s :evilgrin:

peace

[bemildred]

3. Centralized networks are brittle.

And they don't scale worth a damn.

[fedsron2us]

4. "Like a giant office network"

If its like some I have used it will be down half the time.

[bemildred]

6. True, they tend to be incompetently managed too.

Capitalist overlords like centralized management, it's one of the big
weaknesses they have, like dinosaurs. They talk about all the Peter
Drucker shit, but when you go to work for them you find out it's the
same old power-mad, robotic micromanagement stuff. If it wasn't for
the constant subsidy and propping up from the government they'd mostly
collapse like Enron in a year or two, or get eaten by evil foreigners.