Geography, Laws, and the Internet

Sara Chan writes: "This week's edition of The Economist has the cover story and lead editorial devoted to how geography affects the Internet after all. The whole of China is basically firewalled. In France, Yahoo! is appealing the court ruling that banned its selling Nazi memorabilia. In Iran, ISPs are required to block immoral sites. Each country wants to impose its own laws on others, of course without reciprocation. The editorial concludes thus: "The likely outcome is that, like shipping and aviation, the Internet will be subject to a patchwork of overlapping regulations, with local laws that respect local sensibilities, supplemented by higher-level rules governing cross-border transactions and international standards." Not all new, but worth pondering."

Comments

China is firewalled

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in China, and the firewall is *very* obvious.

Some days, I try to get through to slashdot but I get a "Access to this page is denied" error on my screen.

Most people don't realise the extent of the firewall. 90% of the time, if I send an email to another country it doesn't arrive at the destination.

One time I even had an email message changed - I was simply stating that I was feeling a bit unhappy due to lack of money, and it changed to I was feeling unwell, but *because* of all the money flowing around the place I *was* happy.

Be thankfull for what you have !

Re:China is firewalled

[Bryan Ischo]

That is a complete and utter fabrication. I have been living in China for seven months now, using China's public internet service the whole time, and have never experienced the above.

Yes, China does filter out sites, but that is the extent of it. I have never received any "access denied" error when visiting Slashdot, and I visit it every day, from Beijing no less, where the Communist Party's dictums are most readily observed.

True, China's connection to the outside world is slow and unreliable at times, but that's not selective by site - it's just poor network infrastructure.

Please don't spread FUD about China ... there is alot of it here already, and you're not helping clear things up for anyone. Americans who know little about China will jump at the chance to believe anything negative about this country, and you are just giving them more ammunition.

My own personal opinion is that China's filtering policy is lame and misguided, but hey, this is their country, they can do what they want with it.

Re:All of China is not firewalled.

[tb3]

I don't think that is entirely accurate, either. The main article says that China is filtered not firewalled, as the editorial states. This makes more sense, since IIRC, a lot of servers in China got hit by Code Red. This shouldn't have happened if there was a Great Firewall of China.