“They’ve done nothing and gotten a lot of credit for it”

Bill Gates, the world’s richest man now re-cast as a global philanthropist, has pronounced his verdict on the Chinese internet row, telling the ABC television network’s Good Morning America that web censorship in China is ‘very limited’.

“The Chinese efforts to censor the internet have been very limited,” he said, “It’s easy to go around it, and so I think keeping the Internet thriving there is very important.”

There are many things to be said about the extent and nature of web censorship in China, but “very limited” is not one them.

As Preston Gall at Computer World put’s it.

“He’s wrong. The Great Firewall of China is not ‘very limited;’ if it were limited the Chinese government would not bother to spend the amount of time and money it does enforcing Internet censorship.”

While it is true that “scaling the wall” using a Virtual Proxy Network (VPN) is relatively simple, the truth is that most people in China don’t know how to do it.

It is also true that most people in China can’t be bothered to do it – which is part of the subtle effectiveness of the system. The Great Firewall is far enough back from ordinary life that most of China’s chatters and gamers are not inconvenienced by it, but that doesn’t mean censorship is limited.

On the contrary, it is omnipresent, hanging over the Chinese internet (and society) like a brooding cloud, shaping the actions and habits of its users even when it is not overt.

I was thinking that this was really too cynical, but then I read Gates comments to the New York Times “bits” blog in which Gates said he was unimpressed and perplexed by Google’s so-called ‘stand’ over censorship.

“They’ve done nothing and gotten a lot of credit for it,” was Gate’s observation. That sounds dangerously like sour grapes to me.

Even if he doesn’t mean to, Gates is presenting himself as a China stooge and a shameless opportunist. My betting is that this will backfire horribly – for him and Microsoft – on both sides of the Great Firewall.

(peter foster)

www.DONEforyou.eu

[Via http://doneworld.wordpress.com]