As we described in our 2012 Year In Review, Herdict saw a large increase in reports from Vietnam last year. In 2012, Herdict received over twenty thousand inaccessible reports from Vietnam, making it the country with the second-highest number of inaccessible reports, behind China.The total number of reports submitted from Vietnam more than doubled between 2011 and 2012.
According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), much of this filtering stems from the Vietnamese government’s fears about political instability from citizen journalism. RSF’s 2012 “Enemies of the Internet” analysis of Vietnam states that “The regime’s attention is focused on the Arab world and its protest movements. Paranoid Vietnamese authorities have stepped up repression and control to stave off any possibility of a regime collapse.”
This increase in reports indicates a persistence of Vietnam’s filtering regime (and an expansion of Herdict reports from region), rather than an increase in filtering itself. According to the OpenNet Initiative, as of 2012, the filtering regime, albeit strict, is not particularly effective and is inconsistently applied across ISP’s in Vietnam. Moreover, according to RSF’s report on Vietnam, “Filtering is no longer the main method used to curtail Internet freedom.” Instead, over the past two years, the Vietnamese government has focused its attention on monitoring, surveillance, and cyberattacks as a means of suppression.
Because Vietnam’s filtering regime has not greatly changed in intensity, the increase in reporting from Vietnam may reflect growing concern about the country’s political filtering. The 2012 Vietnam data indicates that over two-thirds of the reports to Herdict were related to political or news sites. In contrast, very few inaccessible reports were about internet tools such as proxies, providing some confirmation that circumvention has historically not been difficult in Vietnam.
On January 4, 2013, greatfire.org (a Herdict partner) broke the news that in early December 2012, Google quietly removed a feature that informed Chinese search users about which of their search terms may be subject to government censorship. Google implemented the feature in May 2012, and provided a notice to users when their search query contained sensitive terms that would likely cause government controls to temporarily sever their connection to Google. Users alerted to blocked terms could try to bypass government controls by modifying the terms of their search queries.
Though Google acknowledged its removal of the feature after GreatFire’s post, it has declined to comment any further. An anonymous Chinese source quoted in The Guardian said that the Chinese government’s efforts to disable the notification feature had rendered it “counterproductive” for Google to continue supporting the feature.
GreatFire speculates that Google removed the feature in order to ensure that Google services would be available in the large and potentially lucrative Chinese market. In the weeks leading up to the feature’s removal, the Chinese government became more aggressive in blocking Google’s services, culminating in a complete block for 24 hours on November 9. Although service was restored, heightened intermittent blocking continued thereafter. At the time, the crackdown was attributed to the ongoing 18th Party Congress. Whatever the primary motivation for filtering, it was likely a significant disruption for Google and their Chinese users. GreatFire argues that Google may have removed its censorship-alert feature in order to placate the Chinese government and improve its standing in the Chinese market.
Wired suggests that removing the censorship feature is an attempt on Google’s part to improve user experience: “Essentially, no one is going to stick with your service if it keeps getting them booted off the internet or bothering them with pop-ups telling them things they already know.” This explanation, however, is not entirely sensible. First, one of Google’s motivations for the feature was to help its users avoid getting kicked off the Internet by alerting them about risky search terms before they became an issue. Second, Chinese censors are ultimately concerned with restricting access to content and the search results that link to that content. Even with the censorship-alert feature inactive, Chinese censors are just as invested in blocking access to search results, meaning that Google could prevent its users from getting “booted off” only if it self-censored its search results.
By no longer warning users about which search terms may disrupt connectivity, some people may find Google in China to be a more frustrating experience. However, that may be a worthwhile tradeoff for Google if removing the alert means that Google services will be available more generally for Chinese users.
In a review of Herdict reports from China in the month periods before the Google outage, the month following the outage, and the month since Google remove the feature, we could not identify a clear trend in general Google accessibility in China. Since December 8, the date by which the censorship-alert feature had been removed, Herdict has not received a significant number of inaccessible reports for google.com from China. However, services such as video.google.com, encrypted.google.com, youtube.com, and news.google.com have been reported as entirely or almost entirely inaccessible. We encourage Chinese users to continue submitting reports to Herdict regarding the accessibility of Google services.
Internet censorship in China, which has long been pervasive, has become even greater in recent weeks, to the point that even those in China who could usually find ways to get around the imposed restrictions are struggling to view sites such as gmail.com and imdb.com.
The LA Times reports that the tech-savvy Internet users in China wishing to access social networking and other sites that are routinely blocked, such as Twitter, Facebook and also, more recently, the New York Times, could previously download VPN software that would allow them to bypass the “Great Firewall.” A VPN tool encrypts users’ web activity and ‘scal[es] the Great Firewall by logging on to a server overseas to use as a proxy to access the outside Internet’.
However, VPNs have been less effective of late. According to some reports, users are experiencing problems including ‘access denied’ messages and even software crashes after a short period of usage. Many commercial VPN services have stopped working.
This apparent crackdown on VPNs seems in contrast to what appeared to be fewer restrictions on microblogging. For instance, the largest and most significant Chinese microblogging site, Sina Weibo, began allowing users to search for top government leaders by name, a function which they had previously blocked. Sina Weibo also allowed criticism of lower-level government officials to be more specific, which led to investigations and dismissals of several officials.
However, Michael Anti, the prominent journalist and commentator on Chinese social media, told Voice of America News that these changes did not in fact signal new openness for microblogging. “CCTV, the national TV station, has already had the function of criticizing and monitoring local corruption since the 1990s. Now they’re repeating the same thing on Weibo,” he says. “I don’t regard this as progress. It just proves Weibo is now becoming a part of central media.” Anti points out that Weibo has a team of censors that filters out and rigorously monitors anything that could be classed as a threat, including any mention of China’s top leaders.
Following the legislature’s proposal on December 24 for requiring real identity registration before accessing online services (ostensibly to help prevent the occurrence of online fraud), experts suspect that Chinese censors have found a way to detect VPN connections and block them. The VPN providers claim that these issues are due to apparent changes in the firewall, with state media responding that Chinese law does not protect them if they have not taken the required step of registering with the government.
While many were hoping that the change in China’s leadership, which takes place once every ten years, would result in greater freedom for the approximately 500 million Internet users in China, it appears that Beijing authorities may be tightening the existing restrictions. Their actions suggest that the new leader, Xi Jinping, is at least as worried about online content as his predecessor.
The concern for those in power is that the publication of stories about government corruption pose a threat to government stability. “'[The powers that be] are still very paranoid about the potentially destabilising effect of the Internet,’ said Willy Lam, a politics specialist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. ‘They are on the point of losing a monopoly on information, but they still are very eager to control the dissemination of views‘”.
In addition to censoring content, regulators have proposed rules which would keep foreign companies from distributing items and material such as books, music, and news. Both companies and Chinese scientists have complained that this level of restriction does more harm than good. For example, according to the American Chamber of Commerce in China, 74% of companies said unstable Internet access “impedes their ability to do business.”
Unfortunately, Willy Lam (Chinese University of Hong Kong) says that Chinese leaders feel that the cost of Internet censorship is both sustainable and worthwhile, and that compromise the issue is unlikely to be reached any time soon.
Jean-Loup Richet, Special Herdict Contributor
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