Lets take a moment to chat about censorship. Today’s case study involves China and their infamous Firewall. Duncan Riley contends that China has put a blanket ban on RSS feeds. The reason? It prevents clever users in the country from skirting the Firewall through their feed readers. Before I take a look at some of the implications of this, lets test it out.

After running the feed here at How To Split An Atom through the Great Firewall of China field tester, I came back with these results.

• Hong Kong, China : OK
• Beijing, China : Blocked
• Shanghai, China : Blocked

Just for the sake of completion, I ran the domain itself through the test. The results were a little more encouraging, everything came back as working.

Net Effect?

The question that is raised is whether it should be a countries right to censor content in the great wide web. Unfortunately, despite my distaste for the idea, he who controls the fiber controls its use. In any country where the infrastructure that brings the Internet to your doorstep is in the hands of a government body, this sort of thing will happen. Is there anything that can be done about it? I imagine asking nicely would not work very well.

Why am I not more upset about this?

The problem is that this is only a single symptom of a much larger problem. Popular belief is that the Internet is somehow free of the sort of nationalistic entanglements and economic maneuvering that we have grown to expect out of other industries. Isn’t the Internet supposed to be the great, untamed wilderness of proxies and pipes, uncontrollable by any single entity? This is, unfortunately, not the case. While the Internet can’t be centrally controlled, it doesn’t really have to be if you can regulate the “tubes” running into your citizen’s homes.

Here on this shore, we are not free of this same kind of thinking. Recently the Department of Justice came out against Net Neutrality, the principle that bandwidth is bandwidth no matter who is funneling it where. Taking an Orwellian leap, this gives ISPs the right to cap the bandwidth used by any site that they would like. Which may include sites that it would act as their direct competition. For example, it is not insane to believe that an ISP like AOL might cap YouTube to promote its own video services.

The point? It might be time to look at the Internet as a whole. What do we really want it to be? A platform for free information exchange, a utility to make our lives easier, or a service — like television — to be regulated on the whim of governments and agencies. I am not sure we all agree on which path we want to go down.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Did China block RSS feeds? Probably. The only thing is that this isn’t the first nor the last time that a government will stand in the way of free information exchange. Instead of getting upset at the symptom, it might be time to look at the root causes of the problem. Also, we may have arrived at point when we should discuss, as an increasingly global culture, what we believe the Internet should be and how we can put in more in line with this ideal.

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