Tim May said:
The Chinese want a Bamboo Curtain, the Muslims want a Veiled Curtain, the Jews want a Wailing Wall, and the Germans wanted barbed wire. It ain't gonna work.
If you think in terms of content, you're right -- they all want different and contradictory things. But from another persepctive, they're all in agreement: they want to preserve their ability to censor and filter information and ideas, and they want to hold people accountable for writing and saying things which are forbidden. The headers I clipped off of Tim's post might not be as farfetched as they seem at first. What if they built a central storehouse of technical information that's accessible to all, transactional systems that facilitate international trade between member states, and left cultural and political content to the tyrants of the respective nations? Everyone's can grab mechanical engineering info, and evryone can buy shoes from China, but Islamic users will have to rely on Islamic sources for world news and political commentary. Differences in human languages are going to make the tyrants' job a lot easier -- how many Chineese speak Arabic? They won't have to monitor each piece of data to affix attributes for every petty jurisdiction. All they'll need is a core of bland utilitarian information that's open to all -- each country can produce and consume whatever information it sees fit domestically. And if everything is verified with state issued digital signatures, anyone who steps over the line can be imprisoned, tortured, or killed. Suppose I'm an electrical engineer in Iraq. I could have access to non-political technical information that might be generated in China, and I could buy chips produced in an Asian dictatorship online. I can post to technical groups, and what I write will be available to electrical engineers all over the world. I can post to religious/poltical groups, and what I write will only be available to those in the Islamic world. In both cases, my signature is affixed to whatever I write, and I can be held accountable. The rules for the forums are different -- I can't say anything about Islam in the electrical engineering group. If I do, I'll be punished. But the same content would be perfectly acceptable in another group that only goes out to the Islamic world. I don't disagree that eventually such a plan will fail. But centrally planned economies competing with market driven ones will eventually fail as well, and that didn't stop communism from casting a long dark shadow over the second half of the century. Is a laissez-faire response based on an extremely promising but still untested analysis (ie., crypto anarchy) prudent?
We ought to speak out against this Chineese net, and start asking questions about Western companies that are collaborating in its construction.
The usual suspects: SAIC, Wackenhut, NewsCorp, etc.
What about companies with better images? Like Sun, RSA, etc? (I seem to remember reading that Sun was selling some hardware -- but my memory isn't good, and I could very well be wrong.)