(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."

Comments

nonsense

[tps12]

This is an absurd abuse of the concept of "economic costs." When economists speak of economic costs, they generally do so regarding costs to the whole of society, not to individual firms. For example, banning automobiles would be very costly to society, as it would drive up (no pun intended) the costs of shipping, and hence almost all commerce. It would also effectively put an end to the auto industry, but this is beside the point.

In this case, it is not newsworthy that banning certain Internet sites will drive Internet-based companies out of business. The macroscopic effect on the entire society is the only thing that concerns the economist, while the politician has still other concerns (for example, a small hit to the GDP might be worthwhile if it decreases hate crimes significantly; this is the reasoning behind European anti-Nazi propoganda laws).

As a final thought, consider that one of the primary purposes of the DMCA was to protect the record industry from the effects of a dynamic free market. Slashdotters have been uncharacteristically perceptive in recognizing that the profitibility of a single industry or firm should not dictate legislation, and we should be similarly open-minded regarding China's operations. By cutting down on the amount of data flowing in to the nation, they maximize the bandwidth available to the users of legitimate Internet sites, so the effects could turn out positive in the end. Recall also that they are contributing to Linux as well, and don't be dissuaded by impressive-sounding economics lingo.

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.