Month: September 2002

  • Sites Blocked In China

    Jonathan Zittrain and Ben Edelman at Harvard have a site listing URLs that are blocked in China. In addition to some obvious sites (related to things like Chinese dissidents, the Taiwanese government, and Falun Gong), there are some curious sites on the block list, including the U.S. Federal Court system (uscourts.gov). You can go to…

  • The Inflationary Theory of Censorship

    China’s recent decision to block its citizens’ access to Google has been much discussed. Google does not itself offer “subversive” content, so the goal must have been to keep people from finding “subversive” content from elsewhere. This illustrates a general truth about attempts to censor general-purpose communication technologies like the Net. These technologies are so…