People of many nations, languages, and ethnicities visit this blog for information and ideas about advanced nanotechnology... but perhaps not in China.
That's because China's government encourages Internet use for business and education but tries to ban access to material deemed subversive, according to this article.
Simply using terms like "human rights" and "democracy" may be enough to prevent millions of people from reading our blog. China's estimated online population is 87 million, second only to the United States.
What does this kind of oppression mean for the future of nanotechnology, and especially for responsible global management of molecular manufacturing? As we have shown before, cooperation among many nations could be essential. Without it, the world may be unable to avoid economic disruption, social chaos, an unstable arms race, or worse. Unless these and other dangers are effectively prevented, great benefits for humankind also may be lost.
Will the Chinese government be willing to work with others to achieve safe use of nanotechnology? If so, it could require a new attitude on their part toward democracy and human rights. We hope that will be possible, because all our fates may be at stake.
Mike Treder
Great, mention those keywords and have CRN censored too :) It doesn't help matters when the commonly believed paradigm that increased trade and commerce will help politically open up such backwaters, fails because corporations such as Microsoft facilitate censorship for fear of losing marketshare. (By the way, I screwed up the Wise-Nano front page trying to post an article in the "Implementation Policy-Education" section; someone plz fix it if you can. The old main page is still there in the history. Sorry and Thx)
Posted by: cdnprodigy | June 14, 2005 at 07:58 PM
I've been thinking a little about China and censorship and the saying that "The Internet treats censorship as failure and routes around it". I think that's only true so long as there are people who want it to be true, and actively seek ways to make it happen.
What if people whose sites are being censored got angry enough about China's censorship to form a loose info-insurgency against it? If several hundred or thousand sites got together, it wouldn't be hard to finance an "roving web site" - i.e one whose IP address changes frequently enough to stay ahead of the censors.
A little self-installing application could receive a push of the changing IP addresses. Use some of the tricks spammers and virus writers use, to make it hard to get rid of and easy to find and use.
I'm sure China would demand that other nations help them quash it - it'd be interesting to see which nations would be willing to treat as a crime any effort to promote freedom of the internet press in China.
And suppose China retaliated against those that did not cooperate? E.g. suppose it declared that it would not enforce IP rights for those nations - and then secretly financed massive download sites for movies, music, books, auto-ripped "fee" websites, etc. With the movie, music and publishing industries screaming, and even some of the online publishers feeling the pain, how long would it be before governments that had held out previously, caved in and declared that it would "support" China's right to "enforce local standards" on the Internet?
Posted by: Tom Craver | June 15, 2005 at 01:29 PM