China's Censorship Blowback (Featured Blog)
I'm not sure what the Chinese government is thinking, or whether certain parts of certain ministries and party apparatus have gotten completely out of control. Until recently, it had seemed to me that...
View ArticleGreen Dam is Breached... Now What? (Featured Blog)
As a number of China hands predicted, the Chinese government has postponed its mandate requiring that all computers sold in China must include the Green Dam -Youth Escort censorware by today. Yesterday...
View ArticleICANN and Free Speech (Featured Blog)
Upon being appointed as ICANN's new CEO in Sydney, Rod Beckstrom gave a rousing speech in which he stressed the vital importance of free expression on the Internet... Many ordinary, powerless people...
View ArticleICANN, Civil Society, and Free Speech (Featured Blog)
Gordon Crovitz's Op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about the relationship between ICANN and the future of free speech quotes me a couple of times... Crovitz emailed me last week when he was researching...
View ArticleChina's Censorship Arms Race Escalates (Featured Blog)
Last week the China Digital Times reported that a photo (shown in the post) has been making the rounds in Chinese blogs and chatrooms. It is an image of a "computer science float" for Thursday's...
View ArticleIs America Getting More Like China? (Featured Blog)
Since Obama became President -- and yes, I voted for him -- there has been a great deal of optimism and energy around the idea that the Internet can be used to improve or "reboot" our democracy. The...
View ArticleMuzzled by the United Nations (Featured Blog)
The Internet Governance Forum is winding down today in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. There have been a lot of very constructive conversations in workshops and panels over the past four days about how to...
View ArticleChina Isn't Happy With the IGF (Featured Blog)
On the final day of a four-day meeting, most government representatives expressed support for renewing the Internet Governance Forum's five-year mandate which ends next year. China did not. Chen Yin,...
View ArticleChina Tightens Internet Control in the Name of Fighting Porn, Piracy, and...
As the year draws to a close, China's blocking of overseas websites - including Facebook, Twitter, and thousands of other websites including my blog - is more extensive and technically more...
View ArticleGoogle Puts Its Foot Down (Featured Blog)
Google's announcement that it will "review" its business operations in China and is no longer willing to censor its Chinese search engine, Google.cn, is generating a range of reaction in China....
View ArticleGoogle, China, and the Future of Freedom on the Global Internet (Featured Blog)
Maybe it's because I was schooled in political science, not computer science. But frankly I've been surprised by the extent to which some respected commentators have focused on trashing Google for...
View ArticleGoogle Buzzkill (Featured Blog)
The launch of Google Buzz, the new social networking service tied to GMail, was a fiasco to say the least. Its default settings exposed people's e-mail contacts in frightening ways with serious privacy...
View Article"One Google, One World; One China, No Google" (Featured Blog)
China's insomniac twitterati were on fire this afternoon U.S. time, powered no doubt by much caffeine and sugar in the the wee hours of the morning in China. Half an hour before Google's David Drummond...
View ArticleGoogle's China Troubles Continue; Congress Examines U.S. Investment in...
In his latest blog post, Google's Chief Legal Officer David Drummond reports that Chinese authorities aren't happy with the automatic redirection of Google.cn to Hong Kong. They are threatening not to...
View ArticleGoogle.cn Added ICP License Number on Monday (Featured Blog)
Beijing News is reporting (in Chinese) that one of their reporters noticed on Monday that the Google.cn landing page has added an ICP license number dated 2010. The license number had not been there...
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