Our deep integration is because of confidence, but our disagreements are
January 2, 2015 3:27 PM   Subscribe

China seeks to export its vision of the Internet. The Internet should be “free and open, with rules to follow and always following the rule of law,” Lu Wei said, in somewhat contradictory fashion, at the November conference. Asked whether he would consider allowing Facebook in, he was more direct: “I can choose who will be a guest in my home.” He wants others to assert the same power.

In November, Mr. Lu was among the headline speakers at China’s first-ever World Internet Conference, which featured corporate guests from around the globe. In December, he flew to Silicon Valley and visited Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos. He appeared at a Washington Internet forum co-hosted by Microsoft and attended by senior U.S. officials. A few days later, he published an article in the Huffington Post that, in a tidy 1,397 words, laid out China’s vision for what the Internet should look like.

“It’s a bigger problem than most people even imagine,” said Rogier Creemers, a research officer at the University of Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies.

“On a topic that might well be the most important story of our time, being the re-emergence of China, we are reliant upon privately owned communications platforms, some of which are trying to get in China’s good graces.”


Many nations are also newly skeptical of U.S. leadership in cyberspace, following the Edward Snowden revelations of rampant spying. “The U.S. is no longer seen as a benevolent steward of the Internet system,” said Mr. Creemers.

“The whole idea that Cisco routers, which power the Chinese Internet, might have CIA backdoors installed is a huge concern in Chinese policy circles.” China appears to be taking swift action, saying it wants home-grown technology to supplant foreign-sourced goods in sensitive banking, military and other applications by 2020.
posted by Nevin (34 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
I think we could do with a little Chinese internet in the US and Europe. Baidu, in particular, is a very impressive search engine and could provide some much-needed competition to Google. QQ and Sina Weibo are both fascinating social networks. We don't really have something like Alibaba in the US, the B2B commerce part of it.

We tend to look at the Chinese Internet entirely through the lens of censorship, as does this Globe and Mail article. And there is a lot of censorship in the Chinese Internet, indeed in all Chinese media, and I think it is wrong. But the bigger reason for China's strict Internet control is trade protectionism. Google isn't blocked in China just to stop people from looking up Tiananmen Square; it's blocked to make room for Baidu. And in that protected environment with a billion up-and-coming middle class people a lot of interesting stuff has come about.

Tangentially related; Bunnie's recent blogposts about what he calls Gongkai culture in the world of computer hardware and startups in China. The $12 Gongkai Phone, From Gongkai to Open Source. Good reading for a detailed view of some of the tech creativity happening inside China.
posted by Nelson at 3:42 PM on January 2, 2015 [19 favorites]


I think we could do with a little Chinese internet in the US and Europe. Baidu, in particular, is a very impressive search engine and could provide some much-needed competition to Google.

I'm going to stick with doing without the censorship myself. It's true, that's what most people think about when they consider Chinese internet, but there's a good reason for that. Interesting problem spaces are messy, you can make the problems a lot simpler by cleaning them up, but they also become less interesting.

But the bigger reason for China's strict Internet control is trade protectionism. Google isn't blocked in China just to stop people from looking up Tiananmen Square; it's blocked to make room for Baidu.

I really think it's not a bigger reason.
posted by JHarris at 4:20 PM on January 2, 2015 [16 favorites]


The U.S. is no longer seen as a benevolent steward of the Internet system

Good. Because we aren't.
posted by ryanrs at 4:51 PM on January 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


As long as China's vision of the internet involves the great firewall, nobody should be willing to give so much as the time of day to anybody trying to export it.
posted by Pope Guilty at 4:58 PM on January 2, 2015 [7 favorites]


As long as China's vision of the internet involves the great firewall, nobody should be willing to give so much as the time of day to anybody trying to export it.

This is true, but since the US seems to be legitimately considering trashing net neutrality to help Verizon et al make more money, it's difficult for the US to claim the moral high ground.
posted by His thoughts were red thoughts at 5:20 PM on January 2, 2015 [7 favorites]


I find the "gongkai to open source" article rather unconvincing. I think his argument boils down to "We should make it easy to create knockoffs, because it's fun for hobbyists!" I don't see the creation of a ton of cheap clones particularly creative or innovative. But there is a legitimate problem with the US patent system and how it relates to software. I see two options.

Reasonable: shorten the patent lifetime for software. Given the pace of technology in the modern world, 20 years is forever. Make it 4 or 5 years and I think you'd see a lot fewer lawsuits and a lot more innovation.

Nuclear: get rid of software patents entirely. As any competent CS student could tell you, software is just mathematical formula, and any lawyer can tell you that you can't patent mathematical formulas. The market for software won't collapse. When given the option, consumers will choose (and pay for) the product that has a higher quality. And companies who currently protect their shitty software through patents will have to actually produce quality products; you won't see me shedding any tears at their requiem.
posted by sbutler at 5:21 PM on January 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


We have Internet censorship, it's just given a different name. Whether it is the government working with Visa and MasterCard to take away funding sources for WikiLeaks, say, or the DMCA used against people who aren't violating the law, or the FCC being staffed with cable lobbyists to decide on net neutrality policy, the end result of corporate-government collusion is the same.

When I was in college, I used to work late shifts with a Chinese guy with a desert-dry sense of humor. Another coworker jokingly complained about the language being a series of hieroglyphs. This fellow then said we had the same language: logos for Nike, McDonalds, Pizza Hut, etc.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 5:35 PM on January 2, 2015 [8 favorites]


Cisco routers power the Chinese Internet? I thought it was Huawei knockoffs of Cisco routers.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 5:36 PM on January 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


No surprise he met with Cook. Blocking speech in China is a small price to pay for more of that sweet, sweet cash.
posted by Poldo at 6:00 PM on January 2, 2015




We have Internet censorship, it's just given a different name. . . . the end result of corporate-government collusion is the same.

The "America too!" responses to the post are especially hilarious in the context of that Lu Wei piece, which is about the biggest crock of false equivalences I've read all year. Written as if all that "mutual suspicion" and all those "accusations" are just needlessly politicizing what are obvious truths rather than actually having some merit to them and shared by, get this, many other countries!

Now, I am not American and I fully share in the various suspicions of the US Government and its intentions with regard to the future of the internet that have been expressed here. However, I don't accept that it is just as bad or in anyway equivalent as the censorship regime of CCP. To do that seems to me to play into the hands of its propaganda.
posted by Seiten Taisei at 7:00 PM on January 2, 2015 [17 favorites]


The U.S. is no longer seen as a benevolent steward of the Internet system

If only we had a more transparent and benevolent country at the controls. Like China!
posted by p3t3 at 7:16 PM on January 2, 2015 [5 favorites]


For those who think there is some sort of equivalency between the Chinese government and that of trhe US - go to China. Watch the TV. Try to talk to your friends online. Stand in the departure area of Beijing airport and wonder where to buy a newspaper to read on your return journey, Try to start the Chinese Metafilter.

Then come back and tell me that these people should have any say whatsoever in the 'acceptable freedoms' of the Internet. The official attitude to freedom of thought and expression is poison to the things that keep us safe - because they do - against the true perversions of power.

If that's not enough, go to the old East Germany and talk to the generations who lived under the Stasi, before they die. Ask them how important freedom of communication and privacy of thought is.


This isn't negotiable. IT isn';t open to finesse. It isn't ambiguous. It is to be fought, and fought, and fought some more.
posted by Devonian at 7:21 PM on January 2, 2015 [41 favorites]


I found the quote about choosing guests interesting. I think that on the whole consumers should be more discriminating about who they invite to see that much of their lives. But I want to choose my guests, thank you. I am not okay with any government--US, China, Uruguay--making that decision for me in 99% of cases. If you'd like to lock somebody out of my house, I expect you to be able to prove that they're a danger to the public.

If you don't want to let people access Facebook from computers within the Chinese government, say, I'm totally behind that. But I'd better be able to invite people to my dinner parties even if they don't qualify for top government clearances.
posted by Sequence at 7:42 PM on January 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


I wouldn't argue the U.S. and China are the same. I would say their respective attitudes and the end results are similar, and generally bend towards the will of those with money or power. I also think it is naive to suggest the U.S. is some kind of exceptional hero that defends truth and freedom, when its history suggests something altogether different and not too dissimilar from those countries its talking heads criticize.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 8:14 PM on January 2, 2015


I think Americans can be cynical about their system of government. American do enjoy freedoms that Chinese do not. And don't forget that when the UK government censored reporting about Snowden and Wikileaks, the Guardian was able to publish in the States thanks to your Constitution.
posted by Nevin at 9:23 PM on January 2, 2015 [4 favorites]


Are you shitting me? Are you absolutely shitting me? That China can think to say their internet policy is better after their human rights issues? Come on. This is just bullshit. I don't care what the leaders say, this is someone trying to feed us a shit sandwich and tell us how tasty it is. Too bad. I don't agree.
posted by Marie Mon Dieu at 9:31 PM on January 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


Having spent a significant part of the previous year working in Shanghai, and having had to deal with the Great Firewall --both as an end-user as well as an enterprise admin trying to set up a local e-commerce site and corporate office infrastructure, etc-- I can personally state without equivocation: NOBODY needs China's version of the internet, especially the Chinese.

The fact that amazing sites like Baidu and Alibaba and Taobao exist is more a testament to greater Chinese culture and entrepreneurial spirit of those who've been able to take advantage of the economic reforms.

It's really interesting to work with local Chinese on business or personal projects that bump up against government control (which is pretty much everything, really). Your average citizen has a very pragmatic approach to government intrusion. In my experience, it seems to be treated like the weather: often shitty, totally inevitable, oh but here are some little tools and tricks and things to avoid the worst of it.

The fact that every co-worker's first question to me when joining my company is always "so how do I get the corporate VPN on my phone?" speaks volumes about how regular folks feel about China's internet.

I should also note that it's extremely difficult to discuss censorship in general with most people. There's some pretty heavy social conditioning there. When they complain about the internet, it's always couched in words about speed, ease-of-access, missing out on cool Instagram pics, whatever, it's never never EVER about some censorship issue, at least not explicitly.

In short: everybody hates China's Internet except for members of the Party, though they may not be super-inclined to discuss their grievances with you.


Small aside: Yes PRC's government is bad and inhumane, but there are definitely some rays of light that shine through and would have made Marx proud, I think. Sometimes you encounter some protection or agency that exists truly to serve the people and simply wouldn't be possible in most other countries and it's kind of cool and fascinating and hopeful.
posted by Doleful Creature at 9:44 PM on January 2, 2015 [19 favorites]


...we could do with a little Chinese internet in the US and Europe. Baidu, in particular, is a very impressive search engine and could provide some much-needed competition to Google.

I've got friends who work at Baidu, and I think it's a genuinely cool company -- but its search engine is nowhere near as good as Google's, even for Chinese-language search. Its sole advantage over Google is that it's historically been faster and more thorough at indexing discussion forums -- but results are far less relevant in my experience than results through Google. For English-language searches, it's not even close -- though in all likelihood that's due to Baidu not paying much attention to the non-Chinese internet.
Fortunately, Baidu's other properties are a lot more useful -- though China-specific. Baidupedia, which began life as a transparent rip-off of Chinese Wikipedia, is now a fantastic and genuinely helpful resource. Baidu PostBar (貼吧) is still pretty widely used for topic-based discussions. Baidu Zhidao, its question-and-answer platform, comes from an alternate universe in which Yahoo Answers does what it's supposed to.

China has a lot of neat tech companies, but like Baidu, they're very specialized for the Chinese market. Youku began life as another YouTube clone, but is now something much closer to Hulu or Netflix: Chinese internet users don't do UGC nearly as much as US internet users -- home-video is still a pretty new thing there -- but they DO love to watch stuff, and since distribution in China is nowhere near as well developed as in the US, there was an opening for Youku to step in and be the place to go for TV shows and movies. As with most Chinese internet companies, a lot of its early growth was driven by pirated content, but it's now pretty serious about legit licensing deals. Cool company, good execution -- but it evolved in the Chinese environment, and I don't see it being able to replicate its success outside China. (Disclosure: I did some freelance work for Youku three or four years ago, but as far as I know everybody I knew there has since left the company.)

Sina Weibo: For a long time this was actually better than Twitter, since it allowed comments on single posts and was reasonably intelligent about grouping posts and replies together. They've since crapped it up with a ton of advertising, since like Twitter they've got no idea how to make money from their product.

Alibaba/Taobao/TMall and other B2C sites: Taobao is one of the things I miss most about China, and quite possibly the only thing I miss about the Chinese internet. We used to order groceries off Taobao. You can get anything on there -- clothes (including designer labels made on the "ghost shift" at the factory, though this is now harder to find), food, books, electronics. I bought my first iPhone off Taobao -- sort of: instead of purchasing it through the site, I looked up a vendor in Beijing who had good ratings, called the number listed, and told the guy who answered that I wanted to buy an iPhone. He was at my door 45 minutes later and I handed him an envelope full of cash.
The problem is that the things that make Taobao great are still things that are pretty specific to China: the fact that you can get stuff more or less direct from the factory; the fact that labor is so cheap that same-day and next-day courier services are everywhere and cost next to nothing. Lax IPR enforcement too, though Alibaba, like most of the major players, has tightened up a lot since going legit.

tl;dr: There are plenty of cool Chinese internet companies, but they're tied to the Chinese context and most of them will probably never make it overseas.

But the bigger reason for China's strict Internet control is trade protectionism. Google isn't blocked in China just to stop people from looking up Tiananmen Square; it's blocked to make room for Baidu.

Wrong. Not even close. Trade protectionism is certainly a factor -- there's a reason eBay lost hard to Alibaba, and Amazon got curb-stomped by Dangdang, etc. -- but the chief purpose of internet controls is to prevent people from organizing and disseminating information widely. That's why they have automated keyword filters, and why Chinese internet companies are required to have both in-house censors and constantly updated keyword lists -- for an example of which, see Jason Ng's research at Blocked on Weibo. (If you talk to people at any Chinese internet company, they'll tell you -- off the record -- how much they hate having to deal with this stuff: it's expensive and onerous and is only slightly less repugnant to Chinese geek culture than it is to US geek culture.) It's why Sina and other microblog operators had to suspend comments when there were big things brewing in Zhongnanhai, and is why Internet companies have to perform periodic self-abasement rituals like signing "self-monitoring" agreements and pledging to crack down on internet rumors.
More generally, it's because of the same kind of culture that led to China's Academy Award submission a couple of years ago -- a big-budget film from a mainstream, non-dissident director -- having to undergo emergency edits and dialogue looping (and subtitle retranslation, which was where I came in) less than a week before its overseas debut. The people in charge have two settings when it comes to monitoring media and the internet: negligent and paranoid. They were in negligent mode for most of the Hu/Wen years, until about 2009, and then they went straight into paranoid mode. There was a brief relaxation in 2010, and then the Arab Spring happened and the Man decided that the Internet was one of the West's tools for fomenting unrest, and things have pretty much sucked ever since.
posted by bokane at 10:22 PM on January 2, 2015 [30 favorites]


On the other hand, as an average UK citizen, there is lots more evidence that the USA may have spied on me than that China may have done so.
posted by biffa at 12:24 AM on January 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


There are several disjoint issues being conflated here, although maybe that's the goal of the politicians. It's obviously awful that China wants to censor the internet, and we should prevent them from being successful, but..

It's wonderful that China wants home-grown hardware to avoid the backdoors placed in foreign-sourced goods, well *all* countries should want the same, including each different countries within the E.U. All countries should institute local funding initiatives for open source software and hardware. If you're country cannot fund at least one one open hardware developer, and several software distribution developers, then you've really no business complaining about being hacked by the NSA, Chinese, etc.
posted by jeffburdges at 12:37 AM on January 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


I think US corps have more to fear from Chinese industrial espionage, and US individuals have more to fear from NSA backdoors. So the obvious solution is for the corps to use US-built Cisco enterprise equipment, and consumers to use cheap Huawei electronics. Happily, that's pretty much what happens anyway.
posted by ryanrs at 12:48 AM on January 3, 2015


Maybe the Chinese leadership doesn't want it's citizens information and communications in an NSA friendly silo. The US has as much protectionism for reasons of "national security" than China does.
posted by vicx at 4:42 AM on January 3, 2015


In China, the internet surfs the user.
posted by Renoroc at 7:14 AM on January 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


Maybe the Chinese leadership doesn't want it's citizens information and communications in an NSA friendly silo. The US has as much protectionism for reasons of "national security" than China does.

I am as big a critic of the NSA as anyone. What they have done is unconscionable, and I think reining them in is essential to the health of the internet. They are a Bad Organization.

But China? At least the NSA has to skulk in shadows to do the spying they do. The NSA might be watching to see what you say and that may produce a subtle self-censoring effect, but China's censoring is anything but subtle. For all the persecution that's been directed towards Wikileaks, Manning and Snowden, at least their message got out, at least we know about it and can talk about it in places like this one, because the Internet is still, ultimately, free.
posted by JHarris at 7:54 AM on January 3, 2015 [5 favorites]


because the Internet is still, ultimately, free

Word. Ultimately there's only one thing important to me in all this: whoever runs the root DNS servers must have speech protection as permissive or better than the United States. Of the nuclear powers - past, present, near-future, and "sharing" - we still have a better track record here than anybody else.

Our legislature and executive have become wholly corrupt, even Orwellian in places, but in this one very narrow and incredibly important niche we're still fucking up less-badly than everyone else. It may be our sole remaining positive national characteristic.
posted by Ryvar at 10:20 AM on January 3, 2015




China's censoring is anything but subtle

Well maybe there is common thread appearing across the blue lately. Subtle X is still X and Subtle X is no better than Blatant X. You don't get brownie points for being a subtle surveillance state that wants to introduce a secret trade pact to control amongst other things internet freedoms. I can't tell you exactly what is being considered in the TPP - because it's censored LOL. My guess is that DMCA'd without recourse is a roaring success and wants to be expanded.

Surveillance is ubiquitous. Censorship is becoming ubiquitous. It seems like the only noise from the top of the pyramid is about WHO gets to do it.
posted by vicx at 2:00 PM on January 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


The U.S. is no longer seen as a benevolent steward of the Internet system

You can be pretty awful and still be better than China.

There aren't a lot of governments that I'd like to let control the Internet. To any of them, it is simply another pawn to be pushed around the global chessboard to further their interests.

I'd much rather trust the informal cabal of engineers that is the IETF. They at least have very few conflicting motivations aside from running the Internet well.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:50 AM on January 4, 2015


Currently, the domain name system (DNS) is managed the Internet Assigned Names Authority (IANA), a department of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN itself is an American non-profit organisation, formed under contract to the US Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).
IANA works closely with the IETF and the RFC editorial team.

There's a very big change happening right now, which is that the NTIA has asked ICANN to create a transition proposal, such that a global multi-stakeholder community will oversee the internet's domain name system. This means that the US Government will no longer contract IANA’s work; instead, some new, to-be-determined, global, multi-stakeholder community will do so.
Read about it in some detail here

What does that mean in concrete terms? Who will be a stakeholder? Who will be representing the stakeholders? Where will the forum for discussion happen? How will we make sure that this forum isn’t overrun by government or business interests alone?

All good questions, and all extraordinarily hard to answer.

It's being thrashed out right now via various ISOC, ICANN, and NRO mailing lists, teleconferences, and other face-to-face meetings. Issues that affect our freedoms on the net are being protected and debated by a very small group of not-so-well-known, liberal-minded, civil-society-leaning internetworking engineers, computer scientists, and policy advisors.
posted by ix_heloise at 12:44 PM on January 4, 2015


Surveillance is ubiquitous. Censorship is becoming ubiquitous. It seems like the only noise from the top of the pyramid is about WHO gets to do it.

When I made this post I thought the real issue in this case was censorship, not surveillance.
posted by Nevin at 6:53 AM on January 5, 2015


Writers Say They Feel Censored by Surveillance

A survey of writers around the world by the PEN American Center has found that a significant majority said they were deeply concerned with government surveillance, with many reporting that they have avoided, or have considered avoiding, controversial topics in their work or in personal communications as a result.

The findings show that writers consider freedom of expression to be under significant threat around the world in democratic and nondemocratic countries. Some 75 percent of respondents in countries classified as “free,” 84 percent in “partly free” countries, and 80 percent in countries that were “not free” said that they were “very” or “somewhat” worried about government surveillance in their countries.

posted by a lungful of dragon at 9:49 AM on January 5, 2015 [1 favorite]


There is no point trying to convince others. You have to experience it yourself to understand.
posted by vicx at 9:52 AM on January 6, 2015 [1 favorite]




« Older Your skin color has been causing us a lot of...   |   This is how much a Kickstarter would cost you. Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments