mediacrit.com

Visionaries of the Internet have long heralded the new information world as one without traditional geographic, political, or legal limits.

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1972 that “The wired planet has no boundaries and no monopolies of knowledge.” William Gibson, the novelist who coined the word “cyberspace” in the 1980s to represent the virtual reality environment of computing networks, similarly argued “the Internet is transnational. Cyberspace has no borders.” And in 2000, Microsoft leader Bill Gates said “The Internet is a constantly changing global network that knows no borders.”

But as the Internet has matured and global communications have grown more widespread in the 2000s, the old-fashioned political borders of real nations seem as real as ever.

This is now most evident with the operation of the Internet in China. Only about 110 million Chinese are online, a fraction of the country’s 1.3 billion population, but enough Internet users to be second to only the U.S. But in rapidly modernizing China, where for decades the Communist Party has tightly controlled mass communication, the openness of the Internet has led to a clash of cultures. China wants to promote the Internet within its borders, but wants to control it, too.

As more and more Chinese citizens take to the Internet, an estimated 30,000 government censors monitor their use of Web pages, blogs, chat rooms, and emails. This surveillance constitutes what some now call the Great Firewall of China.

Internet police give warning calls to people posting material critical of the government, force Internet service providers to axe unfavorable blogs, and block thousands of international sites from entering its borders. Many Chinese Internet service providers and webmasters learn to self-censor to avoid attracting attention. For those who persist in practicing “subversive” free speech, there can be severe penalties: Paris-based Reporters Without Borders reports that more than 81 cyberdissidents and journalists are in Chinese prisons.

Into this Big Brother Internet environment enters U.S. Internet corporations eager to establish a foothold in the massive Chinese market. Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft are three of the United States’ leading Internet companies, and have long promoted the liberating possibilities of the Internet. Google’s famous corporate motto even states “Do no evil.”

Yet, if evil is censoring information to appease Chinese authorities, then evil has already been done. Earlier this year, Google admitted to creating a new search engine for the China market, Google.cn, that filters out offending sites, including many relating to Tibetan independence, the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Falun Gong religion, and even BBC News. Moreover, the Google.cn site stripped away email and blog features because they might be used for political protest. Microsoft did much the same, prohibiting the creation of blogs with politically unacceptable titles (such as “freedom of speech,” “democracy,” and “human rights”), and deleting Chinese MSN Space blogs that criticized the government.

Yahoo censored web sites on its Chinese-language search portal, too, and went even one loathsome step further: assisting Chinese Internet police in linking computer addresses to the owners of yahoo email accounts. Yahoo’s complicity led to the jailing of at least three cyberdissidents. One of them, journalist Shi Tao, is now serving a 10-year sentence.

China isn’t the only country to try to impose borders on the Internet. As the Open Net Initiative reports, the governments of Bahrain, Burma, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates are also conducting Internet filtering.

There may indeed be borders on the Internet, but if the case of China is any indication, attempts of any country to block free speech on the medium may ultimately be futile. As major U.S. Internet firms meekly yield to the government’s repressive rules, hundreds of thousands of clever Chinese citizens are already bravely evading them, using free services like Hushmail, Freegate, and Ultrasurf (the latter two produced by Chinese immigrants in the U.S.) to break through China’s Great Firewall.