[48818] in Cypherpunks
FYR_wal
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Young)
Wed Jan 31 13:24:24 1996
From: John Young <jya@pipeline.com>
Date: Wed, 31 Jan 1996 13:19:32 -0500
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
1-31-96. WSJ:
"Chinese Firewall: Beijing Seeks to Build Version of the
Internet That Can Be Censored."
"We've eliminated what is undesirable and kept what is
good." Which is, succinctly, China's riposte to the
information age, from satellite television and real-time
news to the Internet. Beijing eagerly seeks the fanciest
information hardware, but it fears much of the software.
China, in short, is determined to do what conventional
wisdom suggests is impossible: Join the information age
while restricting access to information. The reason: If
the Internet has proved its utility, it has also become
a fluid medium for the two things China's authoritarian
government most dreads, political dissent and
pornography.
Industry insiders say China -- which has already bought
some of the most powerful equipment available, from
U.S.-based Cisco Systems Inc. and Sprint International,
a unit of Sprint Corp. -- ultimately aims to create a
monolithic Internet backbone, centrally administered,
that minimizes the threat posed by the Internet's
amoeba-like structure.
FYR_wal
