Lukenotes

Observations

On google.com's about page in the US, one of their tenets is "You can make money without doing evil." On google.cn, the same entry, translated reads "You can make money through the proper channels."

Chinese name for Google written in characters is "Guge" which literally means "valley song."

The connection has been reset by James Fallows, Atlantic Monthly, March 2008.

(everything indented and quoted is a verbatim quote)

• China's internet seems slow (partially due to filtering)
• China will set up less restricted access during the Olympics for foreigners
• China's entire approach to controlling the internet is called the Golden Shield Project

“For two months in 2002, Google’s Chinese site, Google.cn, got a different kind of bad-address treatment, which shunted users to its main competitor, the dominant Chinese search engine, Baidu.” (More about this: Sense and censorship on the Guardian Online)

• Searching Google may return results that are blocked (the results appear, but the links are broken)
• User's online activities are tied to their real names
• China does selective filtering. ie They won't block an entire site, such bbc.co.uk, but they may block part of it that covers a sensitive topic like falun gong, or they might block all of it temporarily.
• Compared to other countries that censor the internet, China has almost no transparency.
• Chinese filtering is relatively easy to get around by using a proxy or a VPN
  • demonstrate what is required to bypass Chinese internet filtering with illustrated examples
  • All foreign businesses in China use VPNs.

“Every bank, every foreign manufacturing company, every retailer, every software vendor needs VPNs to exist,” a Chinese professor told me. “They would have to shut down the next day if asked to send their commercial information through the regular Chinese Internet and the Great Firewall.”

• The government is not worried about completely blocking access to outside information. Their goal is to make such a pain in the ass that most people won't bother.
• Chinese content creators have to play by the rules (self-censor) to reach their intended audience

"“Domestic censorship is the real issue, and it is about social control, human surveillance, peer pressure, and self-censorship,” Xiao Qiang of Berkeley says"

YouTube Unplugged by Spencer and Delaney WSJ

"Google has said it doesn't plan to host user-generated content, such as video, blogs or email, on computer servers in China. Such materials would be vulnerable to seizure by the government if located on servers there."