like, if the direction came down from on high, to copy it ... how few things would have to get flipped on to have roughly the same thing in the united states?
i'd really appreciate an insider's summary. a lot has changed since 2004. probably.
The first part is GFW, with which people outside of China is more familiar. It operates at every international internet cable, analyzing and dynamically blocks traffic in realtime. China only have few sites that connects to international internet, with very limited bandwidth (few Tbps in total), so it's more feasible. But overall speaking, this is the easy part.
The second part of walling a garden is about controlling what's inside the garden. Every website running in China mainland needs an ICP license from the government, which can take weeks. ISPs must be state-owned (there are 4 of them in total, no local small ISPs whatsoever). Residential IPs cannot be used for serving websites because the inbound traffic of well-known ports are blocked, which is required by the law. VPN apps are illegal. etc. These are things that are much harder to do in other countries.
I'd argue it's already been flipped on. Our system just works a little bit differently. Nothing is strictly prohibited via some grand theatrical firewall. Things that are "undesirable" simply meet an information theoretical death sooner than they otherwise should. We've got mountains of tools like DMCA that can precision strike anything naughty while still preserving an illusion of freedom.
Data hoarders are the American version of climbing over the GFW. The strategy of relying on entropy to kill off bad narratives seems to be quite effective. Social media platforms, cloud storage, et. al., are dramatically accelerating this pressure.
The Great Firewall is, among various other things, an attempt to create a single historical narrative for the PRC by blocking out reference to things like Tiananmen, discussions of early twentieth-century China suggesting that China could have gone a different way than the Communist Party and prospered, etc. The USA has absolutely nothing like that, people can readily find open-web and social-media content taking every possible position on American history, both staid academic content and wacko conspiracy theory stuff.
When it all comes down to it, the USA just isn’t as hung up on social harmony and narrative control as the PRC. That’s why there isn’t a comparable system in place, and claiming that the odious DMCA is anywhere close, is hyperbole.
Read up on the motivations behind the TikTok acquisition, or the attempts to legislatively censor certain topics on Wikipedia, or the myriad of knobs used by social media “content review” teams etc, or Chat Control in the EU, or going back further, the surveillance systems detailed in the Snowden leaks (why surveil if censorship isn’t the goal?).
It’s ultimately exactly the same reasoning as that used by the CCP, but in a more subtle and gradual manner. Yes, right now, the GFW is a different beast, but if we do nothing, I would wager that the solutions will converge.
https://time.com/7015026/meta-facebook-zuckerberg-covid-bide...
Misinformation or not, I like form my opinions myself, rather than have the government do it for me. There was absolutely a lot of nonsense[1] going around during covid, but constantly being told what to believe felt extremely irksome.
A good example is how payment processors (mainly the major credit card companies) police adult sites, forcing them to ban certain keywords. It's a weird situation in which the role of morality police is played at the point where control can naturally be exercised in a capitalist economy.
As we'd expect, that same pattern is repeated elsewhere, e.g. in social networks that censor in all sorts of ways, many of them explicitly intended to reinforce the status quo and neutralize or undermine dissent.
When you have an authoritarian government, all of this tends to happen more centrally. But democracies tend to distribute this function throughout the economy and society.