Repression and Routers

China is on the forefront of marrying a modern economy with rigorous political orthodoxy. They are already using their control over the Internet infrastructure to block out political apostasy. If a user points a browser to a prohibited URL, the user receives a benign-appearing "File not found" message. It is difficult to distinguish between the suppression of free speech from ordinary network failures; censorship with a gentler, less aggravating face.

Up until this point, the level of political censorship was limited by the technical capacity to search for offending key words and to block offending IP addresses. To help in enforcement, China employs legions of Internet police. With a planned new upgrade in their communications infrastructure and a new generation of smart routers from Cisco and other manufactures, China is looking forward to a greater capacity for censorship. If censorship can be carried out efficiently at the router level, then perhaps it will be possible to have political censorship without slowing down the commercial communications necessary for a modern economy. Even more depressing, as manufacturers develop new censorship hardware for China, the technology will be available to others, less able to fund the development of such new capability, but certainly willing to employ it if available.

In the face of this development, perhaps there are some glimmers of hope. The personal interactions between people in and out of China, the travel incumbent in commercial societies, will inevitably expose the Chinese to the habits of free people. The willingness to question authority and a personal ease associated with knowing no one is listening over one's shoulder with inevitably infect Chinese culture. Indeed perhaps, it is these same qualities that insure success in the market. The economic success of those who possess such a disposition may leak over into their political dispositions as well.

It is a race between improvements in censorship technology and the inherent need for freedom and openness, coupled with the evolution of technological counter measures. The winner is not yet clear.

Reference:

Cherry, Steven, "The Net Effect," IEEE Spectrum, 38-44, June, 2005.

Go To Page: 1 2