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China: The Great Leap Backwards
This is old news in internet time already but here's the WSJ article:
Wonder what route the computer manufacturers will make considering the size of the Chinese market. Man if Australia pulls the same shit I am outta here.
The personal computer became a political symbol a generation ago, with the television advertisement during the 1984 Super Bowl announcing Apple's Macintosh. A Big Brother character droned on about "information purification directives" until a young woman heaved a sledgehammer, smashing the screen. The message: Computers can protect people from the control and censorship that George Orwell wrote about in "1984."
Fast forward to the plea last week from an Internet user in China: "I don't want to live in 1984."
Beijing recently announced that starting on July 1, all computers sold in China must come installed with government-designed software to block pornography. Testing by Internet experts shows that the software, called Green Dam-Youth Escort, also is designed to censor political and religious Web sites, disable programs when people input sensitive words, monitor personal communications, and track where Chinese citizens go on the Web.
In essence, bureaucrats in China want the world's computer makers to make it easier for their Thought Police to block access to news and information from the outside world, and to punish citizens for the sites they visit and the views they express online.
The pressure is on companies such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Apple, plus Lenovo, which bought IBM's PC business and whose largest shareholder is the Chinese government. The computer companies have kept a low profile, relying on trade associations to lobby Beijing to reconsider the regulations. Technologists would prefer just to be in the business of business, but politics is a fact of business life in China. (And even Chinese people who don't care about blocked information about Tiananmen or anonymity online will object if their new computers have kludgy software that is prone to crashing operating systems.)
Yet when the interests of foreign businesses coincide with the interests of the Chinese people, the kowtow may not be the only corporate option. Consider a precedent from the 1990s. Xinhua, the state news agency, demanded that foreign financial-information providers let government bureaucrats decide what information could be reported and also demanded a big share of the revenues. Dow Jones, which publishes the Journal, and Reuters teamed up to fight the regulations.
James McGregor was the top Dow Jones executive in China at the time. (I was responsible for the company's financial-information operations in Asia.) Mr. McGregor recounts in his book on doing business in China, "One Billion Customers," how two years of lobbying headed off the regulations. The focus was on Chinese ministries such as foreign trade and foreign affairs, as well as Chinese stock-market regulators and central bankers who understood that Chinese financial professionals need access to sound information to make investment and trading decisions.
"The key to winning a fight with the bureaucrats is to appeal to the more confident and reasonable side of China," Mr. McGregor writes. The issue eventually threatened China's admission into the World Trade Organization. Isolated within China's bureaucracy, Xinhua backed down.
Mr. McGregor, now a Beijing-based entrepreneur, has some advice for the computer makers. "They should push for a commercial solution," he says. "If the government is purporting to be focused on blocking pornography, then the industry should work with the government to ensure that there is an open market for quality net-nanny products in China." He adds: "If the government wants to require computer makers to install net-nanny software at the factory, then the computer makers should be free to choose which software they believe would be most effective without damaging the performance of the computers they sell."
Internet censorship is already widely derided by the Chinese people as the "Great Firewall of China." An anti-Green Dam Web site in China attracted more than 10,000 comments. Online surveys by portal Sina.com and even the Web site of the Communist Party newspaper, People's Daily, found that some 80% of responders opposed the plan.
There has been criticism of the plan in state-run media, including editorial suggestions that the censorware on new computers be made optional. This is a sure sign that some parts of the government are embarrassed by the proposal from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and would like the unpopular idea to go away.
Information remains the great enemy of authoritarian governments. The high-tech industry takes pride in giving people new ways to stay informed, communicate with one another, and make their views known. When government bureaucrats demand the collaboration of these companies to deprive people of valued tools, high-tech executives should keep in mind that while pressure from governments is never pleasant, it's the customer who's always right.
Fast forward to the plea last week from an Internet user in China: "I don't want to live in 1984."
Beijing recently announced that starting on July 1, all computers sold in China must come installed with government-designed software to block pornography. Testing by Internet experts shows that the software, called Green Dam-Youth Escort, also is designed to censor political and religious Web sites, disable programs when people input sensitive words, monitor personal communications, and track where Chinese citizens go on the Web.
In essence, bureaucrats in China want the world's computer makers to make it easier for their Thought Police to block access to news and information from the outside world, and to punish citizens for the sites they visit and the views they express online.
The pressure is on companies such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Apple, plus Lenovo, which bought IBM's PC business and whose largest shareholder is the Chinese government. The computer companies have kept a low profile, relying on trade associations to lobby Beijing to reconsider the regulations. Technologists would prefer just to be in the business of business, but politics is a fact of business life in China. (And even Chinese people who don't care about blocked information about Tiananmen or anonymity online will object if their new computers have kludgy software that is prone to crashing operating systems.)
Yet when the interests of foreign businesses coincide with the interests of the Chinese people, the kowtow may not be the only corporate option. Consider a precedent from the 1990s. Xinhua, the state news agency, demanded that foreign financial-information providers let government bureaucrats decide what information could be reported and also demanded a big share of the revenues. Dow Jones, which publishes the Journal, and Reuters teamed up to fight the regulations.
James McGregor was the top Dow Jones executive in China at the time. (I was responsible for the company's financial-information operations in Asia.) Mr. McGregor recounts in his book on doing business in China, "One Billion Customers," how two years of lobbying headed off the regulations. The focus was on Chinese ministries such as foreign trade and foreign affairs, as well as Chinese stock-market regulators and central bankers who understood that Chinese financial professionals need access to sound information to make investment and trading decisions.
"The key to winning a fight with the bureaucrats is to appeal to the more confident and reasonable side of China," Mr. McGregor writes. The issue eventually threatened China's admission into the World Trade Organization. Isolated within China's bureaucracy, Xinhua backed down.
Mr. McGregor, now a Beijing-based entrepreneur, has some advice for the computer makers. "They should push for a commercial solution," he says. "If the government is purporting to be focused on blocking pornography, then the industry should work with the government to ensure that there is an open market for quality net-nanny products in China." He adds: "If the government wants to require computer makers to install net-nanny software at the factory, then the computer makers should be free to choose which software they believe would be most effective without damaging the performance of the computers they sell."
Internet censorship is already widely derided by the Chinese people as the "Great Firewall of China." An anti-Green Dam Web site in China attracted more than 10,000 comments. Online surveys by portal Sina.com and even the Web site of the Communist Party newspaper, People's Daily, found that some 80% of responders opposed the plan.
There has been criticism of the plan in state-run media, including editorial suggestions that the censorware on new computers be made optional. This is a sure sign that some parts of the government are embarrassed by the proposal from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and would like the unpopular idea to go away.
Information remains the great enemy of authoritarian governments. The high-tech industry takes pride in giving people new ways to stay informed, communicate with one another, and make their views known. When government bureaucrats demand the collaboration of these companies to deprive people of valued tools, high-tech executives should keep in mind that while pressure from governments is never pleasant, it's the customer who's always right.
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