Living in China, let me tell you what life is like with restricted internet

http://www.reddit.com/r/SOPA/comments/o7t40/as_someone_living_in_china_let_me_tell_you_what/

by thenextcorner • 15 years ago

126 59 15 years ago

dataminer• 15 years ago

Once you have experienced the open internet, the restricted internet is quite suffocating. Whats more disappointing is that governments in most places around the world are converging towards the Chinese style of access controls and restrictions.

Shenglong2• 15 years ago

I go back to China quite often, and I've never had Google blocked for me. Facebook has been blocked on occasion, and most blog sites are, but it's honestly never been that problematic.

I hate SOPA too, but tying SOPA to the restrictions currently in China is absolutely inaccurate. SOPA's main objective (regardless of whether it'll actually do this) would be to attack pirating sites. In China, they don't really care about pirating. Even mid-sized companies and internet cafes use illegal software. When you ask if it's "real" you get a response that's something like "of course it's real, you can use it."

internet censorship is used for a completely different reason, and should not be compared.

aMoniker• 15 years ago

SOPA's main objective is to give the US government an easy, legal way to shut down sites for a variety of reasons.

Piracy is a pretense.

philwelch3• 15 years ago

SOPA's main effect is to do that. Neither you nor I know anyone's motivations and objectives.

denzil_correa• 15 years ago

> SOPA's main objective (regardless of whether it'll actually do this) would be to attack pirating sites.

Regardless of it's so called "main objectives" SOPA hands omnipotent power in someone's hands. It's like handing machine guns to monkeys.

michaelty• 15 years ago

"SOPA...It's like handing machine guns to monkeys."

I've gotta try this out as an explanation of SOPA to non-techies.

Natsu3• 15 years ago

SOPA would require sites to be blocked at the DNS level. This is not so different from how the Great Firewall of China is actually implemented. See this, for example, for how it works:

http://viewdns.info/research/dns-cache-poisoning-in-the-peop...

And here's what kind of harm that can cause:

http://www.circleid.com/posts/20120107_afilias_says_no_to_so...

While they promise to block "only" pirate sites, they'll soon find that the blocks are ridiculously unworkable until they block all the sites that allow you to bypass them. I don't know whether or not they'll do this, but I strongly suspect they will, because it's the choice every other country who has ever set up a blacklist has made. I've yet to see one where they didn't abuse it, either, for political reasons.

This will drag all sorts of non-pirate sites into the fray and hobble the services, such as VPNs, which can be offered to the public.

jbester• 15 years ago

Wouldn't this hit anyone who linked to wikileaks-like sites?

xiaoma• 15 years ago

>I go back to China quite often, and I've never had Google blocked for me. Facebook has been blocked on occasion, and most blog sites are, but it's honestly never been that problematic.

China has changed since you (apparently) grew up or lived here. There hasn't been a single day in years that I've found YouTube, facebook, Twitter or any of the major blogging sites have been open. Google is generally blocked only for sensitive terms, cache or queries with too many ? query terms in the URL. Gmail, on the other hand is becoming less and less reliable. The internet is barely usable for international sites, especially now that everyone is putting facebook and twitter buttons all over the place.

It's worth pointing out that the pain described above is caused through centralized control of DNS servers... which is exactly what SOPA would create in the US.

Also, in my experience internet cafes don't claim to have 正版 (as you put it "real") software when they don't. They would think you were a bit odd for caring though.

shimon_e• 15 years ago

Actually, you can access the servers that host the youtube flash videos. For example, using a VPN start loading a youtube video. Then disable the VPN. It will continue loading.

wisty• 15 years ago

You need adblock to self-censor. Otherwise every site with Facebook's trojans (i.e. "Like" buttons) will hang while you try to access facebook's blocked domains.

Shenglong2• 15 years ago

I didn't experience any blocking in 2008, and I could access most sites in summer of 2010. I suppose your experience is more recent, though.

chadp• 15 years ago

You are absolutely correct, SOPA is totally different in concept for the blocking of sites.

But there are lots of sites and companies that are not alive because the government doesn't allow it. Want to start a video site? sorry, that is regulated. anything to do with online payments? need a license. social network or any communication website. Yup, need a license.

As a foreigner here in China a blocked or crippled internet is zero effect or relevance on daily life. We just VPN out to the "real" Internet daily.

But if SOPA is approved, there may be no more real internet. Not because facebook or big sites will be blocked however. It will be because the government will have the ability to cut innovation and entrepreneurship off by seizing sites at will.

China doesn't allow social networking sites. What will America and Co. not like and allow?

PakG13• 15 years ago

China has plenty of social networking sites inside of China. China doesn't allow major foreign social networking sites, but they do allow minor foreign social networking sites.

Out of curiosity on that last sentence of mine, I just checked MySpace. It works. If the Chinese government doesn't even care to block it... how the mighty have fallen. :)

cleaver• 15 years ago

For up-to-date reports on outages, check: http://www.herdict.org/

nekojima3• 15 years ago

"I go back to China quite often, and I've never had Google blocked for me. Facebook has been blocked on occasion, and most blog sites are, but it's honestly never been that problematic."

It is problematic when you are being monitored 24/7 and don't have the alternative of waiting a few days until you are in a free country. It is problematic when you want to have an overseas hosted blog, website, files or photos and you can not access them when and where you want.

As myself a regular visitor to, and on-off resident of, China, there could well be a number of reasons why you don't find sites blocked. Most obvious would be using in the airport or at a major western or expensive hotel chain which have a different level of internet access. Where in the country can also have an effect, with Guangdong/Shenzhen/Shanghai (and sometimes Beijing) being the most open. In rural areas and 'political sensitive' there is significant disruption to non-officially sanctioned sites. Which local access provider has an impact too, along with what part of the national intranet you are using (this also links to location, but literally your results may vary depending on provider). The computer you are using, if local, may have software (pre- or unknowingly installed) which blocks or hinders sites or searches, and if you bring a laptop with you, these level can be overcome. Political issues and party campaigns can have significant short-term impacts on particular sites and their availability, this includes locally sanctioned or owned sites.

Most importantly, when in China you may only check a few times on gmail, fb, whatever sites and they may work from those locations or at those times you try. If you are local or living locally as an expat, your results over time will be far more telling.

kaixi• 15 years ago

Two years ago, I stayed in Shanghai for 6 months and my personal experience indicates that most Chinese people don't care about internet censorship.

To understand this, you should first know that internet in China is a whole ecosystem of its own, pretty much like a giant intranet. For every website that's blocked by the government (Facebook, Twitter, etc) there's a Chinese alternative available, such as Renren and Sina Weibo. Everyone uses these alternative sites, and people don't really feel that their online experience is being restricted.

European and American people who go to China have a hard time adapting themselves though.

chrischen• 15 years ago

Read chinasmack.com translated comments. If they're indicative at all, then they seem to realize that they are constantly being censored and "harmonized" on these Chinese controlled sites.

anto1ne• 15 years ago

Chinese internet is like the rest of internet. Chinese people don't care about censorship of external sites, because they don't care about them, the same way you don't care about youku, weibo, kaixin, taobao, etc.. you use youtube, they use youku. And whoever want to bypass censorship can buy a vpn (they're easy to find and reliable). The only thing that can be said about internet in china is that it's dead slow for a foreigner, but that's due to bad overseas connections and L7 filtering. If you go on chinese sites, it's totally ok. I stayed 3 years in china, and was 24/7 on vpn.

olalonde• 15 years ago

I've always perceived the Great Firewall as a protectionist measure rather than censorship (I guess it's a bit of both). It's also been my experience that Chinese people don't care about censorship. Regarding VPNs, it seems they have been cracking down on non authorized VPN vendors lately (my VPN recently stopped working over 3G and some ISPs). (been living there for over a year)

gcb3• 15 years ago

Stenography vpn idea for startup?

JoshTriplett2• 15 years ago

That seems like the entire point: China's firewall tries to create a Chinese internet consisting of people in China browsing sites in China. The internet doesn't work that way. While sites with country-specific audiences do exist, for the most part everyone browses the same Internet. Sites like Baidu, Youku (a YouTube clone), Weibo (a Twitter clone), and other sites hosted in China benefit greatly from the firewall. Without the firewall, those sites would still have an audience, but they'd compete heavily with the much larger audiences on the sites they cloned.

jhancock• 15 years ago

There are multiple facets to the GWF's raison d'être. Most touched on in this thread. One area not given much voice is China's desire to handle legal issues in its domain. If you want a web site in China, you have to have a person (usually through a company) that is the agent responsible for the site. This person must be a Chinese national. That person is the one that has to show up in court if the site/company gets sued. If China is serious about nurturing its legal system, its a perfectly valid approach that parties conducting business in China be required to answer to the legal system when required. This means that if Facebook wants to serve up to Chinese people, they need a Chinese company and agree to be subject to Chinese law for what they serve up in China. Many may not agree with the restrictions on what you can serve up, but this is a different aspect of the GWF.

ezyang• 15 years ago

This is accurate. Ethan Zuckerman has more commentary on the topic here: http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2011/12/28/exploring-the-...

runn1ng• 15 years ago

Can I ask - didn't Australia had something like SOPA too?

I vaguely remember some list of banned Australian sites being leaked on Wikileaks, and some videos about abortion and really random sites being on that list. Do someone knows more?

Natsu3• 15 years ago

The situation in Australia is fairly complex, so rather than attempting to summarize I'll just point you here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Austral...

See also: http://nocleanfeed.com/

darylteo• 15 years ago

Was called the CleanFeed.

Was "delayed indefinitely", but most likely to take it out of the public spotlight... that was a year ago ish. Oh, and elections were on, then.

Joakal• 15 years ago

Internet censorship is now alive in Australia since June-ish 2011.

Most of the biggest ISPs voluntarily adopted Interpol list. And made it mandatory for their customers (I left). Seems odd that they would risk being censorship companies, but there's government money involved to those that do filter Internet.

Long-term, the subscriptions from mandatory censored Internet will be cheaper than Internet freedom subscriptions, so those Freedom ISPs will exit the market.

My next prediction to the Internet censorship: To be eligible to resell NBN, the ISP must have appropriate criminal content filters in place. Making the Freedom ISPs languish behind in the one digit megabit era.

thornbush• 15 years ago

Living in the United States of America, let me tell you what life is like with restricted internet

gcb3• 15 years ago

... movie coming out this summer

gcb3• 15 years ago

Nice. So people are forced to set up their own mail services and all.

Much more secure than assuming some corporation will value your data. Or that dropbox is secure in any way.

Irony apart. 100% of digital goods in China are pirated. That goes along a great way to show how effective internet censorship is for piracy.

On the other hand, most south American countries have free internet (as in speech) and 90% of video games there, even consoles, are pirated.

I'm going to put my money that income controls pirating better than anything else.

shasta• 15 years ago

Do you think stopping piracy of foreign IP is a big concern for the Chinese government? I don't think it's fair to say that this proves that censorship doesn't stop piracy, when that probably isn't a goal (my guess is the Chinese government would prefer piracy over buying licenses overseas).

Natsu3• 15 years ago

They're not really any more effective at stopping the spread of politically embarrassing material. If anything, people openly joke about how they have a 河蟹 ("river crab") society (a pun on 和谐 / harmonious).

As an example, look up the story behind the catchphrase "我爸是李刚."

http://www.chinasmack.com/glossary#%E6%88%91%E7%88%B8%E6%98%...

pavel_lishin• 15 years ago

> Nice. So people are forced to set up their own mail services and all. > Much more secure than assuming some corporation will value your data.

Only if you do it right.

Dn_Ab• 15 years ago

In the thread one point that was being argued for was that the restrictions did nothing to piracy, people could still buy or acquire the goods somehow.

This is just a specific instance of the fact that banning something will just force it underground, make it harder to track, make acquisition become a gamble on authenticity/safety and create negative economic consequences.

In countries where easy download is not possible (either due to restrictions on access or third world lack of internet) the more amoral technologically advantaged start charging rent for access. All they have to do is download and charge something far less than the retail price. If SOPA does succeed in making online piracy harder, it creates an imbalance of power beyond just concentrating authoritarian levels of control in the hands of a few; it also opens up those whose priorities are not in tech to exploitation.

Money that could have been spent within the productive economy (not necessarily on the product) is now diverted to the hidden markets, possibly indirectly funding operations with more overhead. The fact that where access to internet is restricted, such as in third world countries, people are still willing to pay above zero but unwilling to pay at retail suggests a pricing mismatch and that there might be a set of conditions where people will pay at a profit. It also suggests the piracy problem will be compounded as it grows more heads, gets more complicated, gets driven underground and becomes more hazardous. Malware authors may be rubbing their hands in anticipation of writing movie downloading or subscription sites.

If I were to define a minimal basis for which people decide to torrent something its: [level of want, ease of legal access, relative cost of legal access, benefits of legal access, ease of pirating, cost of pirating, weighted odds of getting caught * cost of getting caught]. What SOPA is trying to do is make the cost of catching people illegally sharing super high. Except its not going to work because the infringers are not directly affected by the actual consequences. This is part of why it is hard to explain the consequences to a lay person.

What the producers need to focus on is to increase the ease and benefits of legal access and price reasonably. You can't effectively charge for information. But you can charge for information laced with convenience. People are risk avoiding and are even happy to buy things when they aren't treated worse than the actual infringers. For example, the ease and benefits from buying games on steam so completely dwarfs the ease of piracy that I prefer to not pirate a game even when I think the cost is too high because it is just not worth the hassle and I have experienced something better. I'd rather wait for a sale or prices to drop. I believe most people with a stable monetary situation would actually prefer to not "have" to pirate.

The argument of whether you are entitled to information you cannot access (e.g. tv shows in U.S. not appearing in Europe or overly expensive) is orthogonal and based on personal ethics. The practical reality is enough people will pirate if the conditions are right and there are those who weigh cost above all else - all the money "lost" to them could never have been gotten at a profit in the first place. Rather than whining and holding the internet hostage, the goal should be to maximize conversion and retention of those who can be reasonably swayed to buy while minimizing your costs as a business.

Is this a case of the big publishers committing something akin to the sunk cost fallacy?

elinws• 15 years ago

"...the restrictions did nothing to piracy, people could still buy or acquire the goods somehow."

China today is the Spain of the 16th century.

In the 15th century Spain was a super power. The printing press was invented. Luther, the first media evangelist, frightened the Roman Catholic Church. As part of the inquisition, Spain suppressed the press. As a result, while common people in Protestant countries learned to read and changed the way they produced things, inventing amongst other things, capitalism, Spanish common people did not. Her economy was wreaked. Spain is only now recovering from the suppression of the press.

Some historians will point out that Spain had an active black market, so people could get whatever books they wanted easily. However, to benefit from the black market you have to have learned to read and innovation comes up from the bottom. Literate weavers and felt makers invented capitalism, not dukes, counts, and baronets.

In an information revolution, the context with the freest information wins. Success - economic, cultural, military or political - will go to the most innovative context and innovation comes from information freedom. This is as true today as it was in the printing press information revolution.

SOPA is the beginning of our road to becoming Spain.

introspectif• 15 years ago

Most comments here are dead on:

1.) Youtube, Twitter, Facebook... blocked 2.) Google... rerouted to HK and still censored 3.) Gmail... increasingly unreliable 4.) Chinese mostly don't care, but only because of length of time that the situation has endured. China runs on 'Guanxi', or relationships. In other words, rampant nepotism and (sometimes) thinly veiled corruption. You start company Y competing with foreign company X. You get the government to block company X's service in China. Within a fairly short amount of time, your company's site dominates, and people mostly forget about the foreign competitor. 5.) Foreigners are generally not bothered when using VPNs (I have had excellent experience with one in particular, but avoid posting it publicly for obvious reasons). Assuming, of course, the use is apolitical. 6.) Young Chinese web users have developed conventions for speaking about sensitive topics in ways that (somewhat) evade censorship, such as using homophones, metaphors, etc. 7.) The general atmosphere in China, as regards the censorship, contains less animosity than most westerners would assume. Most web users understand that censors are just doing their job, and occasionally even speak to censors directly in their social network site posts, such as to make a plea to leave the post up for just a little bit longer before censoring it. 8.) In general people in China do desire change, but they're largely pragmatic about it. They've seen incredible progress in their lifetime, and though there are occasional steps backward that are frustrating, the overall march still tends to be in the right general direction (the nature of information - it naturally breeds freedom, bringing access to more information, and thus more freedom, in a virtuous cycle). Young Chinese people are often more informed about political issues than young westerners, through their prolific use of social networking sites (yes - even more than their counterparts in more developed nations).

Ah, back to the point... use a good VPN, and all will be well.

emehrkay• 15 years ago

Sounds like browsing form a fortune 1000 company, or my days at work.

j4pe• 15 years ago

Chinese internet censorship is driven by the Party's need to remain in control, not by corporations seeking intellectual property protection. Little effort is made by Chinese censors to protect copyright holders' content. Though the parallel feels right, the rampant copyright infringement in China cannot be called a result of its internet controls. SOPA has nothing to do with the Great Firewall.

Having spent a long time in China, I can see the dangers of the censorship enabled by SOPA. But I also know that, should the Party decide to eliminate piracy, they could do so. There's simply no incentive right now - it would be an unpopular policy that would largely benefit foreign firms.

PakG13• 15 years ago

That's true, but the content providers seem to start respecting content IP on their own. Youku, Tudou, Baidu, all have started to do this. A Chinese law professor blogger I read says that this is probably because those companies are publicly listed in the US, so not good to bite the hand that feeds you.

ximeng3• 15 years ago

Something that I don't see mentioned much is that China also restricts access to Chinese sites, probably partly to stop foreign countries complaining about copyright violations. Many videos are geo-restricted to be visible in China only, the same is true for music download sites.

Less people raise this because more Western people want to access Western content from China than want to access Chinese content from the West, but it is another issue affecting free exchange of culture. It's also not as straightforward to get a VPN into China as it is to get one out of China. Not to mention that this annoys Chinese students studying abroad who want to watch TV from home.

nekojima3• 15 years ago

"China also restricts access to Chinese sites, probably partly to stop foreign countries complaining about copyright violations"

More often than not it is because the Chinese site is in competition with a state owned or controlled competitor who wants to hobble its competitor, or there is a power shift within the regulating authority or relevant ministry and competing state owned or controlled sites are using their party proxies to hurt another local site for their own gain.

ximeng3• 15 years ago

Not sure about this. Over the past two or three years, ku6, ppstream, youku, tudou, and Tencent TV all started georestriction. It seems there's some government restriction in play.

Robelius• 15 years ago

There is something that I have not seen in any SOPA argument, something that should stick out in this written work on Chinese censorship....our ability to vote. "don_chow" talks about how oppressive the Chinese government. The comments then go into how Congress is attempting to restrict the American people, when it is the opposite. We are restricting ourselves.

I cannot speak on a case by case, but it's hard to argue against the idea that most Americans do not vote. We turn on the TV to CNN, Fox, MSNBC, or whatever you chose. We hear people debate on an issue with the majority in the small debate arguing in your viewpoint. All people do after that is yell at the TV saying "YHA!" then go to bed. We do not take action.

We let the law makers do their job, but when they don't do something we agree with we talk about how bad they are. Then the next big story comes the following week and we are then talking about that. We don't take a stand and speak with what law makers truly care about, our vote.

Law makers create these laws to get lobbiest dollars so that they can run for reelection. However, they wouldn't do these kinds of things if they knew that they won't get that end result, the vote which in turn gives a reelection. If they knew that the electorate within their district or state would put in the effort to research representative/senators then Congress wouldn't try to pass something like this.

The unfortunate truth is that our representative/senators are right. They know that we take little to know action. SOPA is an extremely rare case where the American people actually get up and get involved in government. I agree that SOPA must be stopped, but I also believe that SOPA would not even be here if the American people did their job in the first place and got involved. We can send our men and women around the world to let other nations have the right to vote, yet we can't walk across the street to do it ourselves.

The ironic thing is, the majority of people who do agree with what I say will say "YHA!" and continue surfing the web. Sorry if my thoughts are unorganized, but I am extremely tired and have a headache. I know I am missing a lot of issues I want to hit, but I can get to them in another comment :)

SoftwareMaven• 15 years ago

Until we shift the cash balance away from deep corporate pockets, it is going to matter little how involved people get in politics. Unfortunately, I can't see the kind of reform that would take (and I've seen at least one good idea for it) happening. Those corporate dollars have to much to lose if they can't be spent owning the government.

All hail your new corporate overlords. Makes me want to make my company be successful just so I can have a say in my government. :(

beedogs• 15 years ago

I've always maintained that China is about 10 years ahead of the US in terms of transition to a surveillance society. (The UK is 5 years ahead of the US.)

robryan• 15 years ago

What shaped the attitude to piracy in china? Just thinking about it I guess many Chinese people probably wouldn't be able to afford media, especially stuff from western countries.

Living in China, let me tell you what life is like with restricted internet

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