Consent of the Networked

"Rebecca, used to be a [CNN] journalist here. Her work on the internet in China and on internet freedom in general has been very important in the field and a lot of people have cited her work. Her book provides a sober context for understanding how the Chinese internet works. Correct, but China is where her expertise began and she’s used that to apply her understanding globally. Also, as she puts it in her book, China is the most advanced case of authoritarian control of the internet, and the most advanced example of the negative case for cyber-utopians. She also is no technological determinist, and I would say she is less optimistic than the other two [Lagerkvist and Yang], about where the Chinese internet is heading, or whether the internet is a democratizing force. She sees it more as a struggle, depending on who controls the levers of the internet – whether it’s companies or governments. In China obviously it’s the government, but in the West it can be corporations as well. So I thought it was useful for contextualizing how to think about the internet globally. Yes, and that mindset was always helpful for me to keep in mind as I was writing about China’s approach to the internet. We’re not necessarily comparing China to a completely free internet globally. But it helped me conceptualize that what’s different here in China – versus infringements on freedom in the West – is that the Chinese government has worked very hard to make its internet particularly different and distinct. It has. I think those national champions would have arisen anyway, because as Chinese companies they have some advantages over foreigners – the Chinese language advantage, the Chinese market advantage. But obviously they’re being helped tremendously by what amounts, essentially, to political protectionism. I don’t think protectionism is the goal of the Great Firewall, but it is definitely a by-product. So you have these national champions that rise up and they’re trusted by the government, and by the Party and they’re allowed to flourish, to some degree. They also have to bear the burden of monitoring and self-censorship. It certainly limits their revenue growth and makes their jobs much harder, but it’s a trade-off that some of these companies I’m sure are willing to make. There’s no question censorship slows the internet in China down, though it does depend on what part of the internet you’re using. If you’re using the Chinese internet, and you’re not going to Western sites, it’s much faster. But if you’re going outside China to go online, it will be slower. And people who are working in information technology, say, and many other fields will often need to go outside of China. I think that does impact productivity both for foreigners and Chinese here. I also think not allowing a free-flow of ideas on the internet impedes innovation. If you’re not allowing Facebook, and Twitter and YouTube and whatever chaos the world brings, then you have an environment that is stifling innovation People are concerned. You will hear people speak about this publicly. Kai-Fu Lee [a Beijing based internet entrepreneur who was head of Google China] talks about it a bit. Whether the Communist Party is concerned, I’m not so sure. They see a lot of benefits to the way they manage the internet, and of course Chinese internet companies benefit to a great degree, because they don’t have as much competition from foreign internet companies."