I’d have sworn this was an Onion article if I hadn’t seen it in the Washington Post. According to the article, the Chinese government is going to get rid of all Internet pornography in the country by October 1st, in what it’s calling a “people’s war against electronic pornography.” As if the futility of that wasn’t funny enough, the name of the man tasked with leading the porno crusade, China’s Information Industry Minister, is Wang Xudong. (Yes, I’m still in fifth grade.)
Robert Corn-Revere wrote an excellent paper on Internet censorship for Cato not too long ago. He points out that Saudi Arabia routes all of its net traffic through a single chokepoint where it is reviewed by censors. Obviously China is too large and has too many servers for such a system to be effective there, but the government might try to bully ISPs into doing the censoring for it, a tact that Australia is also considering.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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