According to a new regulatory document (in Chinese) announced by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, a personal website owner have to BE TAKEN a portrait when she/he is about to “register” the basic information of their websites. The title of the new regulation is: The Scheme of Further Commitment of the Verification to the Websites’ Registration Information (Trial Implementing Regulations) [CN: 工业和信息化部关于进一步落实网站备案信息真实性核验工作方案(试行)]

“Registration” is a premising procedure for setting up a website in China.  The information required in the registration includes the domain name, the IP address of the hosting server, the brief introduction of the website’s intended content, the owner/operator’s true name and Chinese citizen ID number, address and other contacts. Although the regulation uses the term of “registration” but not “license”, it is actually a compulsive requirement for any websites. Without registration and the final permission from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, a website will be deemed as an “illegal” one and be shut down (China does have an Administrative License Law restricting the governmental organizations from establishing the administrative licenses arbitrarily, but this law is obviously being ignored, again).

Anyway, before the new regulation, the whole procedure of registration can, at least, be accomplished online, despite it normally needs weeks, or even more than a month in some cases, to get the license.

Now you have to schedule a travel for such registration in accordance with the new regulation. It requires the owners of the personal websites providing their own portrait in the form of registration. To avoid the false portrait, the website owners must present by person with their personal identificatoin documents (like resident ID card, or passport for foreigners), and BEING TAKEN PORTRAIT in the photographic studio (with unified equipped backdrop providing by the MiiT) located at the IDC’s office.

Here is the new procedure of the website registration for individuals:

Webmasters log on the registration system of the MIIT, and input the information

–> The IDCs or the ISPs (hosting service provider) verify the information 

–> If the informaiton is true (deemed by the ISPs)

–> the ISP send the notice of spot verification

–> Webmaster go to the verification center with ID documents

–> If the informaiton is true (deemed by the IDCs)

–> The ISPs or IDCs input the information and upload the portrait to the system

–> the provincial communication administration examine the registration information

–> If the informaiton is true (deemed by the administration)

–> the registration information will be submitted to the MiiT’s system finally

–> the Webmasters will get the permission of establishing the website.

Besides this new procedure, the regulation requires IDCs draw a plan on re-examination of the existing websites (means the websites has been registered beforehand) … it does not said explicitly that the owners of the existing websites also need to BE TAKEN portraits at the IDC’s studio, but leaves such possibility in the wordings.

My comments … speechless, speechless, and …  speechless. It seems more and more difficult to write legal blog posts refrained from grumbling.

BTW, another news. China’s President Jintao Hu was found established a micro-blog at People’s Daily’s twitter-like service (t.people.com.cn) yesterday.  And that micro-blog was symboled with a “verified real person” badge, and a line of bio stating his current position as the Party Chief and the President of China.

Then, in a dozen of hours, that zero-posted micro-blog got 20,000 followers.  Then the server was denied visiting just like being DDOSed. Then the service provider closed “Hu’s” microblog, and confessed that it does not established by President Hu. It is actually an automatically created page for the verified users in the BBS service of the People’s Daily. Hu has (perhaps been) registered an ID with his real name when he showed up for his first online chatting with netizens in 2008.

I wrote in a Chinese post said this “accident” proves, again, that, even if we forget the freedom of expression but aiming at locating the wrong-doers, the real-name registration system will be useless in the circumstance of the rapid developing technology and the constantly changing personal situation nowadays. On the contrary, the case that even our President would BE ESTABLISHED a blog without his consent demonstrates clearly what we need to focus on is not the real-name registration law, but the law of personal data protection, no matter it is associated with a real name or a false one.  The law of real-name registration system is based on the presumption of mistrust, and will increase such mistrust among the stakeholders. The law of personal data protection is based on the presumption of trust, and will decrease the misturst eventually.

 
President Hu’s “verified real-name” micro-blog (screenshot, the page no longer exist).

Thanks for Professor Urs Gasser’s invitation. I am allowed to sit in his course of “Online Law and Business in a Globalized Economy” at Harvard Law School, and get an opportunity to present some understanding to Chinese websites. Because of the limited time slot, I just partly introduced the slides in the class. Therefore, here is a more comprehensive version for those who are interested in.

Hillary Clinton said that “We stand for a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas.” I love this vision, but it is not a truth of the Internet.

It is untrue not only because the dicky openness of a specific network may be destroyed abruptly (The Internet access in Xinjiang, a northwest region in China three times bigger than Califonia, was simply cut out over 6 months after the mob riot and bloody fight between nationalities), but also because the essence of the Internet: It is inter-net, the Network of Networks. It can be described as an information transmission/communication network composed of many autonomous systems. ARPANET, MILNET, Cyclades (France) and NPL (UK) formed the first generation of the Internet (see the video). More autonomous systems then have been setup and joined the Internet – They joined the Internet by accepting the TCP/IP and other protocols. But this does not mean that they have the same policy on the authority to access and the attitude to the network security.

Similiarly, I name the concept of “Cinternet” to the autonomous network in China.  It could be isolated from the other parts of the Internet infrastructurally, linguistically, politically and even culturally. Recently, the trend of such isolation seems jumped from the level of technological blocking to the level of institutional denying. Contrast to Hillary’s vision, this seems to be an existence, no matter “bad” or “good”. It is there.

A Video on the History of the Internet [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIQjrMHTv4 ]:

Google announced that it will not go on filtering the results of web search because it’s E-mail service is attacked. The logic is not that straight forward, but it works at least on emphasizing the not evil slogan. In my view, it is not only the said attacking, but also the anxiety of the culture shock lead Google’s activities. Google is still using its American imagination: fight or obedient, agree or disagree.

Let’s back to the business. Google’s anxiety in China (as well as Yahoo!’s leaving) may be reasoned by the wrongful understanding to Chinese netizens’ demands and surfing usage, which reflect the Chinese culture and social structure.

Let’s start from a comparision between Baidu.com and Google.com:

Besides the advantage of focusing on the Chinese search engine, Baidu has the totally differenct philosophy from Google. Baidu runs pay for placement service (if you pay for some keywords, your link will be among the first few items of the search result of those keywords, with an “Ads” symbol), while google earns money mainly from Adsense (An Ads system automatically match the page). Baidu provides PostBar and MP3 dowloading as its killer applications, whereas Google develops its applications around the E-mail service (including Gtalk and Wave), which is the core of the US netizens’ online life.

Google can hire people who understand Chinese culture. But with the strong value oriented mission setting atomosphere, Google’s headquater obviously often conflicted with its Chinese management team. The result is: Chinese Google (Google.cn) is separated from Google’s world, not because of the gov’s censorship, but because of the misunderstanding on what is a good, attractive and sustainable web service for Chinese customers.

I wish the following websites may be helpful for understanding the unique enviroment of “Cinternet”. The first one is Tianya.cn. Tianya is the most popular and most crowded online forum in China. It’s traffic is ranked No. 90 in the world (Alexa). Click here for more.

Tianya’s virtual community has a few unique features contributing to its flourish and survival:

(1)  It has a huge group of volunteer forum-board masters who are in charge of deleting/hiding the defamatory, dissenting and – most specially – inappropriate posts. The board masters are mostly the famous IDs (in many cases most of users don’t know who the people is in real world), they are famous and reliable only because of their reputation established in Tianya.

(2) The un-deletable and un-editable mechanism. No one can delete/edit his/her own posts at the forum boards, even a board master can only manage the posts at his/her board – as a user in other boards, he can do nothing but posting new threads as a normal user. 

(3) If users think a board master is not appropriate, they may leave the complaint at the manage board – and if those complaints are reasonable, the higher webmaster may decide to suspend the board master’s authority – just like the mechanism of “petition” in China’s real life.

(4) Look at that strucutre map again. It’s “separation of the power” looks very like the actual life in China.

Now this is QQ.com. QQ.com is ranked the world 11th website on the matter of traffics (remember, the traffic among the QQ clients are not counted in). Contrary to Google’s matrix based on search engine and E-mail, QQ’s world is based on Instant Message. It is a close system, not providing open API.

Taobao is not a Chinese Ebay. On the contrary, Ebay’s Chinese branch has been defeated by Taobao. See the above comparision. Alipay, Taobao’s payment tool, archieved over 1.2 billion RMB (171 million USD) of the value of transactions per day on Dec 7th 2009, among its over 200 million users.

Named after a spice used in Szechuan cooking, Douban allows Chinese consumers to share, tag and browse through one another’s collection of books, music, and movies.

The contents in Douban are mostly user generated. However Douban is distinct from Youtube: only comments to the items (books, movies and music albums) are posted on the website. In each item’s page, Douban provides the links to the online bookstores (including Amzon’s Chinese site). The prices are easily compared in an item’s page.

Douban’s biggest distinction from the SNS (like facebook) is: it is not a real-name network. Therefore, it is mainly not for social  and personal networking, but for public expression. Besides the review tab in each item’s pages, users can also establish groups and invite others join. There are thousands of groups and thousands of entries are posted every day. Because most users are in anonymous, discussions are very interest-oriented and open-hearted.

If there were no censorship, Douban might be a good platform to form a classic “public sphere”. However, douban enforces a very strict self-censorship policy. Any thread that may “threat the operation of douban in China” will be hidden (only the author can read). The groups include too much “in-harmonious” topics will be closed by douban’s staff – or be hidden and only the members of the group may read those threads. It is obvious that Douban’s operator does not want this websited be involved into any political debate.

The above is a conclusion to the features of successful websites in China. Practcially speaking, these might be useful for those who wish to invest their money and energy into the Internet industry in China.

Back again to the overall abstract discussion, the world might be flatted by emergence of the Internet, but when more and more parts of this convergence of pink, blue, black or bloody world involve themselves into the Internet, the basic feature of the inter-net as a network of various autonomous systems may be at least continue to be a existence, if not a growing trend, in the new decade. And, with all due desire to the open and equal access to the Internet, I still doubt that the vision of a “single” Internet that believe people must love facebook, twitter and Google wave could be a realist approach to archive that aim.

iPad is coming … Even in the same culture and society, Apple’s world can be so distinct from the PC’s world (they both connected into the Internet). Imaging how big distinction of the Cinternet’s could be.

Following the last post on the 10 websites that lead you understanding Cinternet, I’d like to share more specific observations to two of them. One is Douban.com , a “2.0” site but unique from other web 2.0 sites in English web sphere, and the other is Tianya.cn, a huge BBS that is also different from the western style of discussion groups. From them, one may find the law (I mean the living law, not definitely the legislations) has changed the code. 

1. Douban.com

Douban.com is a unique website that I can not find the counterpart in the English web sphere. It has launched a English site but now suspended.

Named after a spice used in Szechuan cooking, Douban allows Chinese consumers to share, tag and browse through one another’s collection of books, music, and movies. Douban has very good infrastructure which provide the aggregation of the users every act (tag a book after read it or just “want to read”, write a review, rank a movie … all the user’s acts can be aggregated and published to his/her friends’ first page. and each act can be set hidden from the public). According to a user’s acts, douban “guesses” the new books, movies and musics for the user, and recommend the user to other users. Douban released a “Douban 9” channel, which is a social aggregator that the users may use it as an RSS reader, but more openly to the others. Recently, douban launched a “Douban Listen” (douban.fm) channel, which is similiar to Pandora.com.

The contents in Douban are mostly user generated. However Douban is distinct from Youtube: only comments to the items (books, movies and music albums) are posted on the website. In each item’s page, Douban provides the links to the online bookstores (including Amzon’s Chinese site). The prices are easily compared in an item’s page.

Douban’s biggest distinction from the SNS (like facebook) is: it is not a real-name network. Therefore, it is mainly not for social  and personal networking, but for public expression. Besides the review tab in each item’s pages (which are now becoming the most useful resource for Chinese young people’s when they are about to watch a movie or buy a book), users can also establish groups and invite others join. There are thousands of groups and thousands of entries are posted every day. Because the groups are established by the users, one may see many interesting ones. Take the keyword of “man” as an example, there are “man-should-cook” group, “we-love-very-old-man” group, “not-answering-phone-man-should-die” group and more than 370 other ones. Because most users are in anonymous, discussions are very interest-oriented and open.

If there were no censorship, Douban might be a good platform to form a classic “public sphere”. However, douban enforces a very strict self-censorship policy. Any thread that may “threat the operation of douban in China” will be hidden (only the author can read). The groups include too much “in-harmonious” topics will be closed by douban’s staff – or be hidden and only the members of the group may read those threads. It is obvious that Douban’s operator does not want this websited be involved into any political debate. 

2. Tianya.cn

Tianya (means skyline) is the most popular and most crowded online forum in China. And as for the number of the threads and the accounts, maybe in the world. It’s traffic is ranked No. 90 in the world (Alexa). It is the symbol of the prosperous BBS culture in China

Two mechanisms keep Tianya being survival and flourishing:

One is that it has a huge group of volunteer forum-board masters who are in charge of deleting/hiding the defamatory, dissenting and – most specially – inappropriate posts (means the threads should not be posted in specific forum board, like an essay on travel is posted to a forum boad on the gourmandism). Besides, the board masters also have the right to deny some ID’s posting, the right to make a post highlighted, etc. The board masters are mostly the famous IDs (in many cases most of users don’t know who the people is in real world), they are famous and reliable only because of their reputation established in Tianya.

The other is the un-deletable and un-editable mechanism. No one can delete/edit his/her own posts at the forum boards, even a board master can only manage the posts at his/her board – as a user in other boards, he can do nothing but posting new threads as a normal user if users think a board master is not appropriate, they may leave the complaint at the manage board – and if those complaints are reasonable, the higher webmaster may decide to suspend the board master’s authority – just like the mechanism of “petition” in China’s real life.

In Tianya, no one can establish a separate forum/group. All the forums are set by the general webmaster. Users may apply for establishing a new board by posting threads to the “Manage board”, but only the website can make a new board. The ecology of Tianya can be described a pyramid one.

Short conclusion:

Neutrally speaking, the different law in various jurisdiction diversified the digital code, as well as the Internet. When a society is digitized, the Internet is also formulized by the law in such society. “Cinternet” is not only a concept of physical “walled part” of the Internet”, but may be another “sphere” of the Internet, which isolated from other spheres mentally, systematically, and even institutionally – It’s not absolutely a bad thing, or a good one. It may be just an existence.

As Google’s abrupt leaving from China, the splitting of the Internet seems faster and faster. I think the following ten websites can lead observers understanding the Chinese Internet. All of them survived China’s censorship, and are developing rapidly. Compare to the websites that has been blocked (that I listed on Wednesday here), they are the real main stream for the over 400 million Chinese netizens.

First of all, They are all in Chinese, and seldom provide multi-language service. This might be the obstacle for the English speaking researchers, but it can also be regarded as the first typical character of Chinese website – not because of the censorship, but because of the population. The formation of a separate “Sub-internet” needs a big enough population.

There are many great blogs and websites reporting Chinese Internet (Cinternet hereinafter), such as Danwei, Shanghainist, Gokunming, etc. But if one wants to understand the trend of Cinternet, the following websites, as well as a little Chinese, plus some translation tools are necessary.

In my view, when we are talking about the Cinternet, the targets should be the “plain” websites, not those pioneer ones. Each of the following websites is crowded with millions of users, and all of them survived the censorship and/or self-censorship. The core/column of the Cinternet should be based on them but not those obviously unsurvivable ones. For example, a research to Chinese bloggers should focus on not only the independent or even blocked bloggers, but also the mainstream in those highly controlled blog services.

1. http://www.QQ.com (Alexa China 2; world 11; on Jan 15th 2010, the same below)
The top website in China according to Alexa in Jan. 2010. And it has almost all kinds of web application including blog (blog.qq.com), game (qqgame.qq.com), news, sns (qzone.qq.com), search engine (soso.com), micro-blog, C2C (www.paipai.com), and most importantly, Instant Message (im.QQ.com). Almost each Chinese netizen has a QQ number. the number of the accounts has exceeded 900 million in 2007, and the active users were over 400 millions in 2008. Then they only publish the number of  concurrent online users – this number exceeds 80 millions on Oct. 10th 2009, and exceeded 90 millions two months later.

This is a diagram of the concurrent online users of QQ on 5 December 2009. The communication among them are not cacluated by the Alexa.

2. http://Baidu.com (Alexa China 1; world 8)
Baidu is a search engine service provider. Just like Google, it provides many other services like blog (hi.baidu.com). However, the core of baidu is still the web search. It enforces strict artificial intervention to the search result. However, most of Chinese users still take baidu as their first choice. One of the reasons is: Chinese users are more familiar to Baidu’s way of locating Chinese knowledge.

3. http://www.KaiXin001.com/ (Alexa China: 9; world: 56)
A unique SNS different from facebook style, grow rapidly in last two years. 60 Million users up to December 2009 (15 million active users per day). The aim of 2010 is over 100 million. A competitor of KaiXin001 is RenRen.com (Alexa China: 14; world 93). RenRen is the ealiest SNS in China, and it duplicated Facebook’s mode. However, that approach can not compete kaixin001 on the matters of authenticity and the user stickiness.

4. http://DouBan.com  (Alexa China: 24; world: 178)
The unique website that I cannot find the similiar website in English web sphere. It launched an English version but suspended. Some reported that its accounts exceeded 30 million by the end of Dec. 2009 (the number of account by Sept. 2009 was just 10 million). The founder of this website denied it is a SNS. Douban is the most successful Chinese Web 2.0 website. It is a very typical UGC website that the users generate almost all contents in the website. Without the interfere of the government, douban may be one of the promising websites in the ahead 5 years.

5. http://taobao.com (Alexa China: 5; world: 24)
The famous C2C or B2C E-commerce website, together with alipay.com (the online payment leader in China – Alexa China: 32; world: 267) and alibaba (B2B website – Alexa China: 25; world: 109), consist the giant of the E-commerce in China.

6. http://www.tianya.cn (Alexa China: 13; world: 89)
The most crowded Chinese BBS community in the world. With the traditional form of web forum, this website focuses and enlarge hottest news and topics every day. For those focused threads, it is very easy to have more than 100 thousands replies in one day.

7. http://Xunlei.com (Alexa China: 21; world: 129)
Based on its downloading software (Xunlei), Xunlei become the king of the dowloading in China. It declares only providing copyright-free resources, while since Xunlei software is a searchable, unified format “P2SP” software, one may find many copyright-doubtable resources on it. However, forget the copyright, Xunlei is very efficient and can be one of the successful practicers of the “cloud” concept.

8. http://blog.sina.com.cn (Alexa China:4, world:16, as for sina.com.cn)
Sina has been among the top ten Chinese websites for a decade. It is the traditional portal style. Checking the Internet archive of Sina ten years ago here, you will find that the style of the first page of sina had not changed so much. It is a typical obedient private owned website that follows the orders of the regime. As for the future of the Cinternet, observers are suggested to watch sina’s blog channel and the micro-blog channel (t.sina.com.cn).

9. http://youdao.com (Alexa China:42, world:282)
Youdao is the search engine developed by Netease (163.com – Alexa China:7, world:27). It seems paid more attention to the web 2.0 applications and the relevant page arrangement. It has the personalized first page like iGoogle. Netease has other products like 126.com E-mail service (Alexa China:27, world:195). As an old website rise together with sina and sohu.com (Alexa China:8, world:43), Netease seems more willing to embrace the web 2.0. It is the only one opens the free API for the 3rd developers among the four biggest portal sites (QQ, sina, sohu and 163) in China.

10. http://www.hao123.com (Alexa China:23, world:169)
Hao123 is a simple static 1.0 style html page aggregated links of many websites. For geeks, it is stupid and like an antique, but it always stands at the top 30 websites of China. It is the home page of millions of browsers. It was acquired by Baidu in 2006. Baidu keeps it on the original way, even doesn’t make it more customizable.

These websites including the 2.0 oriented sites (douban, youdao) and very static web 1.0 homepage (hao123). While in my view, the main stream of the Cinternet is unique and can not be categorized with Web 1.0/2.0 . Here are the features that I roughly summarized at the current stage.

(1) Accepting the 2.0 ideas, but making the user generated contents controllable. The latest example is t.sina.com.cn, it is launched in October and now become the top one among the micro-blog (as the matter of users’ number) services.

(2) Complying with Chinese culture – I am not saying censorship/dictatorship, but the culture. A typical example can be the comparision between reren.com and kaixin001.com.

(3) One website provides integrated services, but very few websites provide open API.

(4) IM driven. Other than the E-mail driven culture in English cyberspace, the Cinternet is and will still be an IM driven culture. People contact with QQ numbers everywhere. Besides QQ, Taobao has its IM too, and has made being the hub of all the Taobao’s e-commerce applications; sina, baidu, netease and China-Mobile all provide their IM services, but non of them are inter-communicable.

This is just a simple illustration. There must be more features. Here I am actually discussing the appropriate approach to stuy the Chinese web sphere.

There is a big chain restaurant company who named itself Eatool. Based in Amilina (a country allowing people eat almost everything except small chicken), Eatool provides delicious meats, including pork, beef and adult chicken. At the same time, it also sells dishware and other stuffs in each of its restaurants.
I.
Few years ago, Eatool opened a new restaurant in Cinet, a country where the king forbid selling pork, as well as chicken.
Personally, Eatool’s boss loves pork, but he knows that selling pork in their Cinet restaurant means shut down the business including the dishware. So they hired Cinet people run the restaurant in Cinet, and restricted themselves from selling pork. At the same time, Eatool sells dishware to Cinetizens.
In Amilina, many gourmets criticized Eatool for years: “Hey, pork is delicious. You should provide pork in Cinet. People in Cinet need pork!”
In the mean time, some people in Cinet also claimed: “Hey, we love pork. Why Eatool, the leader of the world restaurants, compromise to the evil regulation of forbidding pork?”
More profoundly, some thinkers either in Cinet or in Amilina said: “It’s not the matter of pork; it’s the matter of choice. No government should restrict the choice of eating. It’s a natural right to eat anything that a human being wants to!”
II.
The prince of the Cinet asked his father, “Dad, they are criticizing us not allowing pork…”
“Amilina forbid eating the small chicken. Tell me, why?” The King did not answer the question but asked his son.
“Small chicken should be protected because they are young.”
“Yes, but attention, it’s a moral reason, not a logic one. Eating small chicken is sick and lousy, so they prohibited it. They need a moral legitimacy for ruling the country. We need too. So we prohibit chicken. The different is just the level of moral standards.”
“Oh, OK, Dad. But … how do we distinguish youth chicken and adult chicken?”
“Moral reasons are mostly not steady, and that uncertainty always good for us. You will know that.”
“Then we prohibit the pork for the moral reason too? “
“You are too young, sometimes naive, my son!” Said the king, “It’s not the matter of choice; it’s the matter of interests. Remember: we are good at cooking beef, not pork. If we approve the pork before prepared, you may not be the next king of Cinet, my dear son! If you want to eat pork, just go Amilina, silently. But back to Cinet, we still cannot approve it. You understood?”
“So we prohibit chicken for the moral reason, but prohibit pork for the interests?”
“Not that simple. People used to reasoning their interests with moral argument. Not only us. You will see it. Anyway, pay attention to the guys who bought Eatool’s dishware specific for cooking the pork.”
The next day, Eatool was criticized in Cinet. The state central TV station blames Eatool providing the chicken, and saying chicken endangered the youth’s health. Under the heavy pressure, Eatool revised its menu, deleted all dishes made by chicken.  
III.
A month later, Eatool suddenly sticked a notice at its shop window:
“we decide to sell the pork in Cinet now! We will discuss this with the king of Cinet. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Eatool at Cinet. But we have decided to do that.”
This is a big news. Journalists throng to the office of Eatool’s headquarter.
– “Why do you sell the pork now?”
“Because someone tried to break our dishware!” The CEO of Eatool said with angry.
– “who?”
“Someone, not sure. They tried to break our dishware! Not only our products, but also many other Amilinan companies’. The attackers are organized!”
– “Government based?”
“Not sure, but the attacks are aiming at the dishware that we made for the clients who argue for the freedom of eating, either in Amilina or in Cinet!”
– “Em … what’s the relationship between dishware and pork?”
“Well, they attack the dishware, its violation of human right! We have principle.”
– “Sir, I mean, why didn’t you provide pork before, but now change the mind? Can the pork protect the dishware from attacking?”
“Uh … I guess so … attackers may be busy in ~~ eating pork … em … yes, human rights! They are both the matter of human rights, the matter of freedom of Choice.”
– “When you are saying the dishware, what freedom of choice is about to?”
“Uh… uh…, security! The security of dishware! Without security of dishware, how can we eat pork, beef and even chicken? So as I said, the dishware is highly relevant to the pork. We decide to sell pork because they break our dishware!”
IV.
Reading Eatool’s notice, a client of Eatool’s Cinet shop cried, “Watch it! It’s the principle! The moral of a company! They decided to provide pork! I love Eatool! I will cross the wall and visit Eatool even it’s Cinet restaurant closed! I will not eat in the King’s restaurant, even beef!”
“How did you get the pork before?” Her mama asked, washing the dishware bought from Eatool.
“Cross the wall and visit Eatool’s restaurant in Amilina.”
“So … there is no difference … By the way, where did you buy and repair this dishware?”
“Eatool’s shop in Cinet of course! They don’t prohibit selling dishware! How dare the King prohibit that!”
“OK, after Eatool closes its restaurant in our country. Where can we repair this dishware?”
“Em… cross the wall. It’s all because of the King! I hate the King!”
“Fine, I am old and poor. I cannot afford such long journey for either pork or beef in Eatool’s restaurant in Amilina. Before you fight the King for the Eatool, can you tell Eatool not to change its principle next time? That’s just like the king.“
“No mama, Eatool has principle; it was forced not selling pork!”
“Wash your dishware, dear. Eatool sold you it in Cinet. By the way, I suggest you marry the prince, which makes you eating the pork.”
“NO! I don’t like the prince!”
“OK, OK. Anyway, if you don’t marry the prince nor Eatool, then fight for yourself, for me, for those who cannot afford having diner in Eatool’s restaurant.“

From Google.cn, to G.cn, to Chinese name Guge, this Internet giant tried to fit its size and pose to the bottle of censorship, while it still can not afford the conflict of the values. In 2009, it has been blocked from access, humiliated for spreading porn and accused for copyright infringement. Finally, Google expressed its value in a direct, as well as not Chinese, way.

When I heard this news yesterday, the first thing what I did was to save the page of Google.cn. It may be dead soon.

Following a tweet, people gathered and present flowers to Google Beijing office (click here for more, and the latest report is: along with flowers and candles, a book 1984 by George Orwell joined the gifts for sacrifice):

Twitter  is blocked in China, but yesterday the Chinese twitters made tag #GoogleCN climbed to the top ten of twitter’s keywords. It is a bit touching, and a bit hopeful – A profitable, foreign company get this means filtering and block still not make Chinese people (at least some of them) losing their eyesight and judgment to what is good and what is bad. 

However, they are losing, and may lose faster, along with the Cinternet’s separation from the Internet. Here are the top 20 websites according to Alexa:

1. Google.com: China Gov will not be possible to tolerate such challenge.
2. Facebook.com: blocked.
   
3. Youtube.com: blocked;
   
4. Yahoo.com: it’s Chinese website yahoo.cn has been acquired by Alibaba, a Chinese company;
5. Windows Live, still can be accessed in China, but some blogs are blocked.
6. Wikipedia: blocked.
   
7. Blogger.com: blocked several times.
8. Baidu.com，百度
9. MSN.com: still can be accessed from China.
10. Yahoo.jp: still can be accessed from China
11. QQ.com: China’s top IM provider and the top news website now.
12. Google.co.in: Google India, it will be blocked because Google’s search engine is uniformed.
    
13. Twitter: blocked.
    
14. Myspace: blocked sometime;
15. Google.cn: It will die soon if Google keeps its promise.
    
16. sina.com.cn，新浪
17. Google.de: will also be blocked soon.
    
18. Amazon.com: Some of it’s S3 Servers in America is blocked; it’s Chinese version still works.
19. WordPress.com: has been blocked for a long time.
    
20. Microsoft.com: it is alive.

More blocked website not in the top 20 include but not limit to discuss.com.hk (the largest BBS in Hong Kong), www.mingpaonews.com (the most reliable newspaper in Hong Kong), xanga.com, mitbbs.com (the biggest Chinese forum out of China), flickr.com, etc. Yes,  flickr. So one may know why yahoo sold its Chinese site. The fact is: for each new application that can not be controlled by the Chinese gov, if the operator does not restrict itself, it will be blocked. This is surely not an environment that Google can endure.

From technological block to institutional restriction, the trend of splitting the Internet seems faster than what we had imagine. As I had mentioned in last week’s Berkman fellows hour, the tragic would not be the splitting of the Chinese Internet from the English Internet, but the splitting of the Internet content (no matter what language) among different people – resourceful (technically, economically or politically) people can access all the data, others can access less and less. Controllers may control others and society may be more and more like the beehive.

BTW, two jokes that are RTed among Chinese twitters:

• 1990s baby: I find a foreign website “Google” out of GFW, just like Baidu! 00s: what’s GFW? 10s: what’s website? 20s: what’s foreign? 
• (because baidu was just hacked one day before by some Iran hackers) From depress to delight, will LYH (Baidu.com’s boss) be crazy? No, he is busying on backup of his emails in Gmail.