The number of Facebook users in China is dwindling. Or to be more exact: falling off a cliff. And not by choice, as anyone who has tried to access Facebook in China recently knows.
It’s no secret among people in the Internet business in China that Facebook was interested in the world’s largest Internet user population.
When Jon Myers and partner Chuck Hootman created their first iPhone app, “Cornhole All-Stars,” their aim was to come up with a fun, casual game that would give them a foothold for their new game start-up JUFTi. The last thing they expected was to run into censorship troubles, which they did–in Canada.
Attempts to censor the Internet are spreading to Southeast Asia as governments turn to coercion and intimidation to rein in online criticism.
Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam lack the kind of technology and financial resources that China and some other large countries use to police the Internet.
In the wake of the disputed Iranian election, American Internet companies including Facebook and Twitter have given Iranians an avenue to voice their opinions and to break through the wall of censorship their embattled government has built around the country’s traditional media.
Google sometimes finds itself at a difficult crossroad of wanting to make as much information available to as many people as possible, while still trying to obey the laws of the countries they operate in.
Chinese authorities are having to grapple with more bad publicity for the “Green Dam-Youth Escort” software that Beijing wants to see included with all PCs sold in China from July 1.
Researchers at the University of Michigan have discovered major security vulnerabilities in the Internet filtering software, according to this report. The authors say that initial testing of version 3.17 of the Green Dam software found serious security holes, which the authors attributed to programming errors.
“The Internet represents freedom, but not everywhere.”
So begins the annual “Internet Enemies” report by Reporters Without Borders–and that’s probably the cheeriest line in the entire 39-page document. It goes down from there.
When the Communications Decency Act was enshrined into law with the passage of the historic Telecommunications Act of 1996, it contained a number of controversial provisions that covered “obscene or indecent” online content. But at the behest of ISPs and others concerned about the potentially stifling effects of possible obscenity suits on the still-young network, the CDA also included 47 U.S.C. Sec. 230, commonly known as Section 230, which shielded “interactive computer service providers” from liability for information posted or published by users of their systems.
There’s a famous saying by John Gilmore, that “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” However, that saying may apply equally to other “damage” beyond censorship.
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced on Tuesday that Verizon Communications, Time Warner Cable and Sprint would “shut down major sources of online child pornography.” What Cuomo didn’t say is that his agreement with broadband providers means that they will broadly curb customers’ access to Usenet–the venerable pre-Web home of some 100,000 discussion groups, only a handful of which contain illegal material.
Internet censorship is practically synonymous with China these days. The Chinese government is often used as the poster child for restrictive governments that restrict the free flow of information to its residents. That could be why the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is getting antsy, as Beijing is bound by contract as this year’s Olympic host city to allow the press to report as usual during the games. And reporting as usual means unrestricted Internet access.
Many foreigners who come to China for the Olympics will use the Internet to tell people back home what they have seen and to check what else has happened in the world. The first thing they’ll probably notice is that China’s Internet seems slow. Partly this is because of congestion in China’s internal networks, which affects domestic and international transmissions alike. Partly it is because even electrons take a detectable period of time to travel beneath the Pacific Ocean to servers in America and back again; the trip to and from Europe is even longer, because that goes through America, too. And partly it is because of the delaying cycles imposed by China’s system that monitors what people are looking for on the Internet, especially when they’re looking overseas. That’s what foreigners have heard about.
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