Chinese dissidents say that despite the government’s best efforts to stop them, they are successfully using the internet to spread their messages ever more widely through the world’s most populous country.
But despite the help of several major international corporations and the use of the most sophisticated equipment, the Chinese government is finding the worldwide web much harder to censor than traditional media.
Any idea which corporations are involved?
Btw, I wrote an essay on Chinese censorship for a POLS class when I was an undergrad. Here is the conclusion:
Whether immediate efforts to prevent coordination among dissidents are successful, China’s attempts at censorship are bound to fail in the long run. Because the Internet’s value as a commercial and research tool are bound to grow, and are closely intertwined with alternative uses, the costs of preventing access to any particular material is bound to become prohibitively expensive, especially with the rapid and exponential growth of Internet users in China. Meanwhile, the best strategy democratic nations can follow is to make China’s censorship policy as costly as possible by sponsoring the development of circumvention technologies.
(Edit: “democratic nations” refers to private initiative by citizens of free countries – not another government program.)
