(Economic) Costs of the Great Firewall of China

sdmartin101 writes "The BBC is carrying a story on the economic costs (to the obvious candidates like Internet cafes, and others) of the Chinese government's vigorous Internet filtering program. The story also includes a brief interview with the head of Safeweb, an organization which helps users circumvent governmental censorship on the Web."

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Perverted Ideals

[Flamerule]

Ironically, Professor Hsu admits Safeweb itself accepted controls on its censorship-busting software in order to gain access to US public funds to trial its software last year in tandem with broadcaster Voice of America.

[...]

Safeweb "agreed with VoA to put a filter on the server side" to screen out pornography, said Professor Hsu, acknowledging that homosexual rights sites would be blanked too.

So the program that's supposed to free the citizens of China, Saudi Arabia, etc., from their respective firewalls is itself blocking access to some content? What's the message there, "Censoring is bad, unless applied to naughty porn sites?" Disturbing.

Additionally, as the history of commercial content filtering programs (Surfwatch, etc.) shows, blocking "bad" sites (porn, racism, terrorist handbook, libertarian blogs (!?!)) inevitably cuts off access to legitimate pages as well.