While foreign policy experts in the United States are busy proclaiming the death of the Gaddafi family lineage as some big foreign policy moment, Wired News was quietly reporting what is - in my humble opinion - the single biggest foreign policy uppercut in quite some time by the US Government. With all do respect to the Arab world, the death of another jackass dictator ranks slightly higher than a can of beans in the big picture of United States foreign policy compared to this Texas sized sirloin.
In the emerging 21st century competition between China and the US, this political move represents President Obama ordering the Great Firewall of China nuked from orbit with a brilliant free speech, free economy WTO lawfare chess move. A MUST READ.
The Obama administration publicly admonished China Wednesday for its vast online censorship policies, for the first time officially complaining that blocking U.S.-based internet sites creates “barriers” to free trade.This is a very big deal and the Obama administration is exactly right - this is a big boy money move to open up the Chinese market - and I can tell about ten great personal small business stories on how it will impact the US economy, but I'll focus in on one simple, specific example readers of this blog should be able to easily understand.
The administration, citing World Trade Organization rules, is demanding that China explain its censorship policies. U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk’s office made the demands after a three-year lobbying campaign by the First Amendment Coalition.
“This development is important because it signals the U.S. government’s implicit acceptance of FAC’s position that censorship of the internet can breach the international trade rules enforced by the WTO,” said Peter Scheer, the group’s executive director.
U.S.-based websites blocked in whole or in part by the so-called “Great Firewall of China” include YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo and even the Huffington Post.
In response, China on Thursday blasted the administration.
“We oppose using internet freedom as an excuse to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said.
For as long as I have written on Information Dissemination, most pol-mil Blogger blogs have been blocked by China. For me - this was never good, because we talk a lot about China. I have many hundreds of Asian readers these days (India 800+ daily, Japan 500+ daily), far more than Europe actually, because believe it or not; it would appear rising maritime powers like to read and comment on websites that discuss maritime issues every day.
In June of 2009, I purchased the Domain Name for informationdissemination.net transitioning from the core Blogger server farm to a private host. The day the transition was made was the day before I attended the Current Strategy Forum in Newport, RH, and while I was getting some email from folks saying they were having website problems (caused by DNS host propagation among US ISPs), I was also seeing booming web traffic on this blog.
From my old Blackberry I was unable to really tell during that first day of the conference where all this web traffic was coming from. I figured maybe it was me passing out cards and mingling with a bunch of smart sailors and civilians at Newport. The real story was not as I thought.
That evening after the first day of the conference, I had accumulated over 2,000 unique visits from China, because for the first time ever - Information Dissemination was not being blocked and I was being ranked in Baidu. That lasted nearly a month until July 13, 2009 when Feng posted this article and ruined the party. Apparently, whether Feng knows it or not, he is blacklisted by the Chinese censors, because as of at least 3 months ago both his blog and mine apparently had a content block (vs the normal procedure of a total Chinese DNS block).
Oh well.
Some time passed and I didn't really think about it much, until last year when I got an email from a maritime attorney based in Hong Kong who works with the shipping industry there. He sent me a link, which was blocked by every US and European ISP I tried, that was basically a Hong Kong web host with an RSS feed of Information Dissemination republishing this blogs content using language translation software. Using a little network voodoo, I was eventually able to see the page - and I was pissed! One of the recent posts had 40+ comments - this Hong Kong thief had ads all over his site and was stealing my content!
After developing plans over a few days, what I ended up doing was purchasing one of the Flash advertisement spaces through the web ad company the Hong Kong site was using, and wrote my own Flash ad which passed their testing and was allowed In the advertisement, because it was Flash - I was able to embed a bit of code that basically tracked visit and hit counter information to another offshore server (accessible to all of China) from all (and only) IP addresses inside China so I could track how many Chinese users this Hong Kong thief was getting per day. To my surprise, and honestly to my frustration, the guy was getting an average of 6,000 Chinese viewers per day for my content.
Now for those who don't know, at bare minimum, 6,000 viewers per day would amount to well over $100 a month on the highly unoptimized ad service ID is using - Google AdWords (I'll start caring about my ads one day, just don't hold your breath). At the very minimum, this Hong Kong thief was basically stealing $1200 a year from me using his little RSS trick to supply my content to Chinese readers that I don't have access to. Earlier this year, my ad expired on that host - and after calling in a few favors, I used the data I had collected and forced that host to no longer host my content. To the best of my knowledge, today only a tiny handful of Chinese read my blog, and I can only presume those specific folks are somehow immune to the content rules of the Great Firewall.
For Information Dissemination alone, access to a public Chinese reader market is (potentially) worth, at minimum, $1200 a month - and potentially much more. That $1200 could potentially represent gross taxable income, and ID is but a rain drop in the cyber ocean in the context of the entire US internet - most of which makes far more money in far more productive ways than my horribly optimized use of Google AdWords.
So while this WTO move by the Obama administration may politically represent a nuclear attack against China's Great Firewall censorship of free speech, the economics of this move is not trivial at all in the internet driven economy of the US today. For years China has systematically attacked the United States with lawfare, including attacking the US Navy indirectly through maritime environment related lawsuits. It is really nice to see the US government turning the tables and now doing the same to China for a change. I want to send a heart felt well done to someone in the State Department!
Remember, the largest English reading nation in the world is China. While unlikely, an additional 5,000+ new Chinese readers interested in maritime affairs on this blog - particularly if they actively engaged in the comments - would be one very interesting open source experiment, and that experiment would likely be repeated throughout the US pol-mil web. If given that opportunity, ID will definitely attempt to support such an experiment in the global naval discussion. I don't know if the Obama administration can effectively get rid of the Great Chinese Firewall, but I do know that if they indeed do get rid of the firewall - we can expect an unpredictable, legitimate impact in the US-Chinese relationship. Social connectivity has proven again and again to be a very powerful cultural influence in 2011 - both here in the US and everywhere else in the world. There is no legitimate reason to expect social connectivity wouldn't also have a cultural influence on the Chinese people.
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