The Great Firewall of China, Continued 484
rcs1000 writes "Slate (no longer owned by Microsoft, and therefore an acceptable place to find stories...) has a terrific article on The Filtered Future and how China's censorship is changing - for the worse - the Internet. The piece makes a few points: firstly, China is really trying (largely succefully) to seperate its Internet from the rest of the World; secondly, it may be possible to use technology to circumvent restrictions, but that makes them no less onoreous; thirdly, the sheer invisibility of the restrictions makes them worse (when Google doesn't even show up articles about democracy, that's no good thing); and finally, some Western companies are actively co-operating with the Chinese government in their censorship. Is this the beginning of the end for the global, unregulated, uncensored, Internet?"
Re:average /. reader sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
Irony rears its head (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:4, Insightful)
uncensored?? (Score:3, Insightful)
What happened to freedom of information? (Score:2, Insightful)
Even more unfortunate is a mostly non-free Chinese market and a country that denies its citizen freedom to information, while a mostly free USA aids them in closing off information access.
It's a companies perogative to decide what it wants to do. But it's also a duty of a government to protect while not oppressing its people.
Limiting circulation of governmental data to strengthen security is one thing. To prevent a people from accessing information so they can't learn about other forms of government is unforgivable.
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:5, Insightful)
These companies are not bending to Chinese will , They are simply doing what they do best.
I was watching a rather interesting documentary a few weeks back called "the corporation" which went over a few things in this area (along with describing the way that in America since corporations are described as legal people , they could be classified as psychopathic).
http://www.thecorporation.com/ [thecorporation.com]
This is a good thing (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:5, Insightful)
Here in Europe, as I believe it is in the US too, Companies are given rights akin to people. They want to be treated like people. They create brands which reflect their 'personalities'.
So, were I to say that people are only there to make money, and need no 'moral or social values', would you agree?
Would it be alright if I used slave labour [nike.com]?
Would it be alright if I killed for a more take-home every month [haliburton.com]?
Lie [enron.com] and cheat [worldcom.com]?
Bully my neighbours [microsoft.com] to score me a better deal?
Were I such a person, I would be lynched real quick!
Corporates are Sociopaths! [amazon.com]
Not the "end", a continuation (Score:3, Insightful)
Every country has the sovereign right to make its own laws. And since I don't believe that unfettered Internet access (however nice it is) falls in the category of a "Basic Human Right", I don't think that the companies that help China with the Great Firewall are committing any great sin.
An objection could be made, I suppose, that blocking Child Porn is completely different from blocking information about Democracy, but I propose that it is merely a difference of degree. Every country has different morals, beliefs, and laws, and I think it's completely appropriate for companies to respect the local requirements. Once again, I don't think Internet access is a Basic Human Right, so I don't see any ethical issues here.
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:5, Insightful)
Thinking that it's governments responsibility to make moral rules is so stupid. Moral and law are not the same thing. There is laws that are immoral and you are not supposed to make rules for all moral behavior. Law and moral may overlap but they are not the same thing. Moral behavior means that you behave morally even if there is no punishment. Only immoral people (and immoral companies) act morally because they fear punishment.
Moral values are to be expressed in all human behavior. Personal lives, work and politics. It's absurd to think that if enough people join together to run organization to make money (company), moral values do not apply.
Re:I WANTED FIRST POST (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Still, you have to hand it to them (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Still, you have to hand it to them (Score:3, Insightful)
Promoting social policy via financial incentives is nothing new. The US tax system rewards being married (in most cases), which of course means that it penalizes unmarried couples. And many countries with low birth rates give extra money to people who have children. The Chinese one-child policy is just the same thing, only in reverse, which makes sense for a country that already has an unwieldy amount of people.
Yes, there have been cases where enforcement of the policy goes way too far (forced sterilization, for example), but that doesn't mean that the policy itself is unreasonable.
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This is a good thing (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:4, Insightful)
'The Corporation' is a fascinating documentry on the effects that multi-nationals have on our every day lives. Here (SE UK) I found a copy at the local blockbusters (and no, the irony is not wasted on me) if you can find a copy it is well-worth checking out.
You may never drink milk or eat dairy products again!
Re:Not the "end", a continuation (Score:3, Insightful)
An objection could be made, I suppose, that blocking Child Porn is completely different from blocking information about Democracy, but I propose that it is merely a difference of degree.
No, it's a difference in kind, not just of degree. It is illegal in the many countries to access child porn, but it is not illegal to debate the merits of child porn on the internet. Democracy is not the legal form of government in China, and it *is* illegal to debate its merits on the internet.
Do you not see the difference?
DO blame companies (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM Germany was happy to make punch card systems to help the Nazis run their concentration camps. Companies are run by human beings. Decisions are made by human beings. We can blame the human beings who make immoral choices. Nuremberg established the principle that "I was just followong orders" does not absolve you of personal responsibility. Even less does it mean they cannot be criticised.
Re:Not the "end", a continuation (Score:3, Insightful)
Nonsense. According to your criteria, the United Kingdom does not have a legitimate government (due to the lack of a Constitution).
I think that the legitimacy of a government basically comes down to how well it serves the people that it governs. I think that if you ask most people in China today how things are going, they would reply that they are pleased by how much their lives are improving.
This has nothing to do with being "genetically subservient" (I find it bizarre that you say that), but everything to do with the fact that people are usually happy when their lives are getting better. And, like it or not, the authoritarian Chinese government has managed to improve the lives of the Chinese people dramatically. This outweighs any displeasure they might have at not having much government representation.
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:4, Insightful)
Communism. Thats the problem causing the Great Firewall of China, not Google or Microsoft or Cisco, but the underlying Totalitarianism of China.
This is a system that's killed far more people than Hitler in the 20th Century. This is a Government bent on far more demanding and bloody Imperalism than the United States would ever think of and to get it's "lost" Taiwan back might very well embark on a war that would destablize not only the Pacific Rim but the entire World's Economy.
Yet, on Slashdot, most of the time from what I've seen when theres a story about the Chinese Space Program or Linux, it's "Go China! Those good and resourceful folks!" And when it's about censorship, "Booo Capitalist Corporations who as enabling China!".
China wants the Internet censored, if all the Corps in the Free World banned togeather and said no, China would roll thier own solution. If it wasn't Google and Cisco doing this, but IT companies in Germany would
Re:Still, you have to hand it to them (Score:3, Insightful)
You can successfully convince a majority of these billions of people that it is in their own best interest to give up their own ability to decide what to read or say.
The chinese people didn't give anything up because they've never had that ability in the first place.
Actually, I was pretty impressed that they managed to push through their one-child policy as well -- that had to be a hell of a tough sell.
Sell? It's not like the people had a choice. China has a very stringent central government. Pretty effective for Large projects. For instance, forcibly moving 1.5 million people is pretty damn easy since they have no rights.
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:1, Insightful)
Laws are morality. Thou Shalt Not Kill - Murder is illegal. Thou Shalt Not Steal - Stealing is illegal. Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Wife - Adultery is illegal. Most laws are merely refinements explaining what is or isn't moral. You can kick a guy when he's down, but only if x, y, & z are in place, and if you don't kick him too hard.
The only thing that's absurd is to expect that corporations to do the moral thing. They can, often because the company founder is in charge and in control. But as soon as that person leaves the company they'll regularly do everything they were restricted from doing. As soon as Sam Walton died Wal-Mart started doing all the immoral things that Sam Walton refused to let them do.
expression of ideas is key (Score:5, Insightful)
No, neither is access to paper to print on, or printing presses, but we still take for granted that the government should not seize printing presses based on what ideas they were used to disseminate, and that that is a natural continuation of a basic human right, the freedom of expression (UN Declaration of the Human Rights, article 19, http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html [un.org]).
So, if you regulate the Internet to weed out uncomfortable ideas, you are indeed violating the UN declaration of the Human Rights, to which I believe China is a party.
Also:
Every country has the sovereign right to make its own laws.
Indeed, but by signing said convention, you are giving up a part of the sovereignity of the country (article 2).
An objection could be made, I suppose, that blocking Child Porn is completely different from blocking information about Democracy, but I propose that it is merely a difference of degree.
Do that. However, not that the freedom of expression protects the exchange of ideas and information. It can be argued that child porn is not an opinion. In all western democracies that prohibit child porn, it is still legal to have opinions about child porn (that it should be legal, for instance).
The comparison had been more accurate if you had compared with how some companies cooperate with the French government to stop foreign nazi sites and goods to be served to the French public. The quite common European prohibition against racist incitement and other hate crimes are indeed an limitation of the freedom of expression (well-founded as it may be).
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:4, Insightful)
China is not a communist state.
Its got a capitalistic system running. No communist would want to be a good capitalist.
China is a country run by a dictatorship which calls itself communist just out of tradition.
Okay, blame companies - but do it intelligently. (Score:3, Insightful)
You are right but it's difficult to abandon a rule that isn't officially a rule, merely a side effect of circumstances.
Companies are driven by the desire for personal gain of their shareholders. Shareholders are quite often only interested in making money, not in exercising responsible control of their company shares. This is especially true for mutual funds [wikipedia.org].
What government can do when personal greed dictates the rules is limited, because personal greed can also sway an election.
In my opinion you need to force companies to publish ethics and adhere to these ethics. That demand has to come from as many people as possible, including but not limited to shareholders. To do this a navigable system of ethical policies seems helpful. I'm currently trying to design a recommendation for such a system: Ethics Search Protocol (ESP) for Internet Search Engines [nongnu.org].
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:3, Insightful)
In addition, you have the fact that as part of a corporation, you are more or less anonymous when creating policy, unless you are at the very top of the chain, so like trolls on the internet, you have less restraint in your ethics.
So, no, they don't live apart from moral dimensions, but they sure lend themselves to a different accounting system.
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:5, Insightful)
We have laws because we cannot trust people to make up their own moral code.
We can not trust people to make up their own moral code, maybe. But we can expect them do.
I think that's one of the major problems. With comments like "they're a company, don't expect them to care about anything except profit" we demonstrate how we have stopped expecting people to act ethically. If we did, we'd have considerably more ethical people. And if we specifically said that those ethics applied to what you did at work, and what you contributed to, then I think we'd have more ethical companies and offices.
But we don't. We have been taught to think that whatever the market does it right. Or, if it's not right, that it's inevitable.
But people are made by their environment as much as they make it. It is a two way street. If we would start expecting people to have some humanity, they will start to. It might be disheartening because you feel like you're the one moral person who is getting beat up by the people who don't. (If you do, feel better knowing there are others out there who still feel that there is such thing as right and wrong and that trying to live ethically makes life fuller.)
But the alternative is no better -- we will continue to have to do more and more reprehensible things just to get by. Our kids have to take ritalin to compete in school now. To make it up the corperate ladder you have to stab people in the back. These kinds of awful realities are only going to increase unless we fight against it and insist that our business, cultural, and political leaders have some decency.
Laws aren't the basis of morality in the society, they're (hopefully) the product. But once we deffer too much to law and too little to our own ability to konw what is right and wrong, the more we have to depend on those laws just to maintain our society.
A cultural insistance on personal morality and responsibility would provide us a means to resisting the world we're heading towards (and are already wading in.)
This isn't some kind of "we need religion in our government" dogmatic position. We need a balance. But just withdrawing and saying, "to each his own" leaves us with a soceity that only hasn't collapsed because we have a reasonably well rooted judicial system.
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:5, Insightful)
Corporations are fictitious entities. They don't exist in any real form. The people who constitute the organized group activity we apply the label to, however, are quite real.
And it's incumbant upon those people to act in an ethical fashion. Simply being part of the organization called 'a corporation' doesn't excuse immoral behavior. It's unfortunate that the courts allow the fiction of 'corporation' to shield evil-doers from prosecution in many cases and, I think, a rather clear perversion of any rational definition of the word 'person'.
Sadly, there is no penalty for dealing with brutal dictatorships, or for betraying every ideal America supposedly holds dear by assisting that dictatorship in retaining power. But it's rather hard to press home the case for blame when the government does the very same thing (e.g., Saudi Arabia).
Even so, I personally think that anyone willing to betray the ideals embodied in the Constitution are traitors and vermin. That includes both the swine at Google who assist the Chinese in building their great firewall and the swine in the federal government who actively prop up the Saudi royal family. And at the end of the day it isn't a 'corporation' or a 'government' that's to blame, but the people hiding behind these labels who're actually doing the dirty work that assists these dictatorships in maintaining their power.
Max
Chinese Internet Users & Democracy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And who's to say... (Score:3, Insightful)
> freedom of the press is supposedly paramount, this is a very scary thing.
You want to talk scary... Judith Miller is sitting in a jail cell _right
now_, for being unwilling to reveal an anonymous source for story on
the Valerie Plame leak.
Things are tough all over.
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:2, Insightful)
Yet we seem quite happy to allow the import of goods manufactured in just such conditions elsewhere, out of sight and out of mind, just so we can all have our mobile phones and DVD players and Tony Blair can pretend we are not working class any more.
We should have banned long ago the import of any goods produced out of accordance with the prevailing standards in the destination country with respect to employees' hygiene, safety, right to choose whether or not to belong to a trade union, waste minimisation, recycling and energy saving measures. Otherwise we're just exporting bad practice.
We should stop buying goods from China right now and only start again after the second multi-party election in a row {just to prove they are serious}. And this is not something that can be achieved by a consumer boycott, because not everything that comes out of China is destined directly for consumers: for instance, a lot of electronic components are made in China, and if one company stopped using Chinese parts they would lose out to less-scrupulous competitors who continued to do so. Government action is required to force companies not to buy from China.
From an American expat in China (Score:5, Insightful)
But when you make a comparison, you find that the United states has these same problems, but only to a different degree. The US has poverty and financial hardship - you can easily find statistics through a google search. The US indirectly censors the media, if you consider that the vast majority of the public only receives it's information from mainstream corportate sources that are deeply tied with members of the US government and will only present a certain view point. And the people really don't have a real say in the political process, considering that the US isn't really a true democracy - it's a pseudo-republic, one with two entrenched millionaire clubs that are highly exclusive and aristocratic.
You only have to look at the last thousand Slashdot stories to find hundreds of examples of abuse of power in the US. I'm living in China and find everything just as comfortable here, and I am actually able to access almost all the information that those in the US are.
Ideologically the US and China are different, but in reality they are not much different.
LS
LEgislate against censorship (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:5, Insightful)
Be consistent which is it? Totalitarianism or communism? One does not necessarily imply the other.
Additionally, to call China "communist" has been laughable for more than a decade now. Don't be confused, the reason for this is totalitarianism, not communism. Whether their previous status as a communist state is the reason for their current totalitarianism is a debate for another day, but it's clearly neither what they are now, nor what is (or even would be) causing this problem.
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:3, Insightful)
Stop splitting hairs and listen to the grandparents' point. It's a good one--it's not the western companies that are the root cause of this, but the Chinese government.
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:3, Insightful)
If a tobacco company proudly offers tips on quitting smoking, you can bet that there is a memo (with backing evidence) from the CEO in a drawer that says that this program will create more profit from goodwill than it will lose by actually helping customers quit.
The same holds true for every donation, endowment, and charitable act. The CEO has to be able to tell the shareholders that the 'charitable' act somehow can net the company more money than the act cost. Call it free advertising, lawsuit avoidance or buying goodwill from regulators.
BTW IANAL
Re:Still, you have to hand it to them (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Okay, blame companies - but do it intelligently (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A bit paranoid article... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Stop blaming companies (Score:4, Insightful)
Interestingly Karl Marx is nowadays subject of study of many great economists. If you study economics in Ivy League you might have to reed Marx. Reason why the father of communism is so hip is because Marx had very good understanding of capitalism.
[1]The Political Science of Karl Marx [ox.ac.uk]Re:Not the "end", a continuation (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong. That is an outdated notion, stemming from the Peace of Westphalia, the notion that the fundamental political unit is the State.
Modern political theory holds that the fundamental political unit is the individual. You may be familiar with a popular espousal of this political theory:
Governments derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed. They, States, do not have rights, they have powers, and when they exercise those powers without the consent of those governed, then those governments are *not* legitimate ones, they're just a bunch of thugs with guns and the will to use them.
Just like China.
Don't complain just because you don't agree. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you actually bother to read the above posts, they are not being anti-capitalist. They are simply against corporate capitalism, which isn't really capitalism, but a form of mercantalism (anyone remember their US Revolutionary War history?).
People who talk about getting rid of government interference in business forget that the mere existence of corporations is a form of interference. In real capitalism, individuals would own companies and be held directly responsible for what the company does, both financially and criminally. In corporate capitalism, the absolute worst that can happen is that the corporation goes bankrupt. But even then, if you have good lobbyists and "honest" politicians (to use the Gilded Age euphemism), you can get the government to pass laws that are favorable to your business or even bail you out if you are in trouble.
Since you are complaining that the above was modded "insightful", keep in mind that even though it is something that you disagree with, it may still be insightful. Also, if you have mod points, many on /. would appreciate you and others not modding down something simply because you disagree with it. I never mod comments like yours down because I know that it is your opinion, even though I happen to disagree with it.
Just like ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:DO blame companies (Score:2, Insightful)
The US has never recognised that its citizens can be guilty of following an order - even where that involoved the murder or rape of innocent people.
Re:DO blame companies (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd be curious to see the consequences of US soldiers taking their personal responsibilities......
Re:Ironically, it's Capitalism's Fault (Score:3, Insightful)
It's really about power, the people who have it, and their desire to keep it. Socialism, Capitalism, Boontism, who cares, as long as the power stays where it is.
I agree with a later poster, that having a freewheeling, energetic, innovative economy, PLUS rigid control from the top with perpetuation of power is an inconsistent model.
Re:Companies in prison. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say that if a company does something bad enough to be worth a long-term suspension, let it start from the bottom again (just like humans) when it "gets out."
No Difference? (Score:2, Insightful)