It's my lucky day - two columns in 24 hours! Newsweek has just published my column on Green Dam (even though it was written before the Chinese government agreed to relax the rules). I tried to argue that the introduction of Green Dam is actually going to be counterproductive if greater control is what the Chinese authorities are after. Well, judge for yourself.
Beijing might have had a better chance to get China's PC-using
masses to acquiesce to a well-designed program that was selective about
blocking pornographic content. But because Green Dam blocks legitimate
content and increases vulnerability to hacking, it may provoke a
backlash. Since Green Dam currently works with only one operating
system, Windows, it may push some users to experiment with Linux.
Others might learn the advanced tricks of Windows or experiment with
advanced anticensorship and privacy tools, which may not have been a
high priority before the imposition of Green Dam.
Taking
on pornography may also be more difficult than Beijing thinks. By most
accounts, it is the Internet's biggest killer app. Blocking it would
run afoul of the "cute-cat theory of digital activism," which holds
that it's always best to post illicit content on extremely popular Web
sites. (Shutting down YouTube, for instance, may thwart a handful of
dissidents, but it would upset many millions of cat lovers.) The
popularity of online pornography, of course, outshines even that of
pets. "There are probably more people in China who want to look at porn
than want to look at Western human-rights sites or Falun Gong sites,"
says Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media.
There may be no more effective way of promoting awareness of
anticensorship tools than putting a bug-ridden program between
pornography and a generation of teens.
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