The Great Firewall of China

Filed in archive Internet on September 23, 2007

CiviBlog Dot Org has an excellent article online at the moment about internet censorship in China.

Many countries (perhaps most) exercise some amount of censorship over the Internet. In most cases that censorship involves some government authority identifying specific sites or domains that are then blocked. But like in so many other areas of life, China is different...




In The Great Firewall of China, the people at CiviBlog explain that censorship in China is designed like a "panopticon", a sort of prison where the guards can observe anyone whenever they want to and the inmates never know whether they're being observed right now or not. The result is self-censorship (and paranoia, I suspect).

The article examines Internet censorship in general, but that topic has a special interest for entrepreneurs and investor in China because the Internet is such a thriving economic sector. Guessing how censorship, specifically Chinese censorship, will impact consumer behavior is a hard task. The process of censorship in China makes success in venture capital projects that are related to the Internet just a little bit more like hitting a moving target...