A few months ago Microsoft caved in a huge way and shut down the MSN Spaces blog of a popular Chinese blogger at Beijing’s request. The blog discussed “sensitive topics” such as China’s relations with Taiwan and press freedoms in China, stuff it is not in the best interests of that repressive regime to be made more public than it already is.
These are the dangers of free blog hosting, whether it be an MSN Spaces site, or (among others) a Blogspot (read Google) site; if Google is filtering web searches in China how long will it be (if it hasn’t already started) before blogspot.com is comes under pressure to censor content?
Cisco (the router folks) have their offering for repressive regimes, as do the good folks at Barracuda (the SPAM folks) who have a specific setting to bring their product into compliance with the People’s Republic of China laws requiring the filtering of government specified keywords.
These are western companies willing to talk the talk, but when push comes to dollars, they cannot walk the walk.
Ah the glory of the free market. The reality is that any company is going to do pretty much whatever it’s told by the Chinese government, despite what their slogan, or company mantra says. The Chinese market is just too big for any CEO to stand up to, they get week in the knees just thinking about it.
I’ve also been hearing rumours of more content going missing off Blogspot and similar sites. I think we all know what the answer is. Cuban blog hosts. Castro would allow the questionable content (providing it doesn’t criticize him) just to annoy other world leaders. He loves that shit.