“The Green Dam Phenomenon: Governments everywhere are treading on Web freedoms”
If, in the early nineties, the governments of the world had realized just how much power the Internet would offer their citizens, I have little doubt that it would have been quietly strangled in its cradle. Since they missed that opportunity, they’re trying to censor it instead — even in democratic countries that should know better, like Britain and Australia. Fortunately, enough people are resisting their efforts that I doubt many of them will go through.
Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.
— Justice Louis Brandeis, Other People’s Money, and How the Bankers Use It, 1933.
I emailed you about the Chinese “Green Dam” being reversed, China decided not to go through with it, for the time being. I was surprised, frankly, I didn’t expect that China would care considering how much censorship they do already…
It’s likely that they backed down because the Green Dam software is bug-riddled crap (and stolen bug-riddled crap on top of that), rather than for any human-rights reasons.
Nah, China doesn’t care about that too much, and if they did, they are surely capable of writing something or hiring a firm to do it for them. (They pay a lot to major western corporations for their “great firewall of China” already.)
The whole point to Green Dam was that it was home-grown Chinese software, so they could trust it. Would you want your dictatorial regime’s first-line censorship system to be dependent on software designed and built in a democracy?
It wasn’t home-grown though, it was partially pirated!
Given the enormous history of Chinese knockoffs, maybe that counts as home-grown there.