The Great Firewall of China

This is a continuation of yesterday's post on Walled Gardens. Arguably the greatest walled garden of them all is China. It even has a wall! A great one.

The Great Firewall of China

China is not a democracy, of course, so the elite who control the country cannot be voted out of power.Even more so after this week when term limits were removed. I'm not sure how China could be where it is today, almost overnight, as a democracy, since one-man-one-vote means that the rural poor would have overwhelmed everything. We have a mild version of that in the US Senate, where we don't have one-man-one-vote, we have one-state-two-votes meaning our own rural inhabitants have an outsized influence on policy despite agriculture being a small part of the economy and an even smaller part of the employment picture. Ethanol subsidies, anyone? But that's a topic for another day (and another blog).

The one thing the powers that be fear in China is another revolution. They are in a pretty good shape so long as they continue to deliver prosperity, but there are still dissidents. Those in rural areas who do not have the economic prosperity of the big cities, and people with political grievances of one form or another. So in China, everything is monitored. To make that easier, a lot of the internet is blocked. This is known as the Great Firewall of China.

It is unclear if the original purpose was to create Chinese companies that are more easily controlled or just to keep places where free speech is too free inaccessible. A lot of Chinese policy requires exporters to transfer technology as part of the deal. Make China Great Again.

So whether it was driven by people being able to find pictures of that guy in front of the tank too easliy, or to make their own ecosystem, the result has been Chinese versions of US companies. Google is blocked in China, the big search engine is Baidu. YouTube is blocked. Facebook is blocked. People use WeChat for that (also known as Weixin). WhatsApp doesn't seem to be blocked, despite being owned by Facebook, but everyone in China uses WeChat for messaging already, so nobody cares. Blogs on blogger are blocked, maybe just because Google owns it, since blogs on Wordpress don't seem to be.

Some of the Chinese companies are bigger than their US equivalents, although there is reasonable doubt about any numbers coming from China, whether from the government or from big companies, which operate with the government's license, official or otherwise.

Mobile payments are clearly much more advanced than in the US. Even roadside vegetable sellers take electronic payments, and perhaps don't want to bother with cash that can be stolen. I noticed the same thing a couple of years ago when I was in Tanzania, one of the homes of M-pesa. Mobile payments in China are at least 10 times as big as in US. Governments like that, since cash can't be tracked. Harvard economist Ken Rogoff has proposed abolishing the $100 bill.

Alibaba is more than twice the size of Amazon, more than three times the size of eBay, more than the two of them combined. On Singles Day in November, it says it had sales of $25B. As the always amusing but dubiously reliable Zero Hedge says:

To put this figure in perspective, this year, "Singles Day" GMV came in at just a few billion more than the annual revenue of Sears/K-Mart (140,000 employees and 1,500 locations world-wide)..... again, I'll repeat that..... Alibaba sold, shipped and delivered the annual, global, sales volume of Sears/K-Mart in just one day! ....800 Million orders to deliver! Incredible! Bravo!.....all those guys on the tuk-tuks, scooters and bicycles must be exhausted...

However, outside of China, these companies are nobodies. I see some parallels with the Japanese markets for mobile phones twenty years ago, They dominated in Japan, were very advanced, but gave up competing globally, and were eventually largely driven out of the rest of the world and, increasingly, even Japan. Japan didn't directly block competitors like the Great Firewall does, but it had its own Japanese standards that nobody else could be bothered with, that came to the same thing.

One reason that Chinese companies aren't getting anywhere outside of China is that inward focus, of course. But it's also because nobody trusts them not to be controlled in some way, maybe minor, maybe major, by the Chinese government. For example, here's an article Outside of China WeChat Is Like a Fish out of Water. WhatsApp has end-to-end encryption, meaning that even WhatsApp/Fecebook can't see what you are saying (which US law enforcement hates, because...terrorism...child porn...drugs). WeChat is encrypted from phone to WeChat, and from WeChat to phone. They claim "third parties are unable to view the content of your messages." But then you see a screenshot like this (from the Fish out of Water article):

Of course, even my photoshop skills are up to making a graphic like that, but I assume it's a genuine log.

So when it comes to China, the net is certainly not interpreting censorship as damage and routing around it. For now, China is more like AOL's walled garden in the early days of the internet, when a few geeks who were determined could find a wormhole out into the raw, dangerous internet. Today, that wormhole is the VPN (virtual private network).

VPNs

One way to tunnel through the great firewall is with a VPN (virtual private network). Cadence, like most large companies, uses a VPN for security. However, it also has the side effect of letting Cadence employees in China see Facebook and YouTube. There have also been a lot of VPNs accessible to consumers on app stores. The great firewall reportedly sometimes slows these down since it can tell it's a VPN even though it can't read the content (like I can tell people are speaking Japanese without being able to understand what they are saying).

From the end of March, the Chinese are cracking down on these VPNs (I assume the commercial types will continue to function), so it remains to be seen whether that loophole survives. Most of them run on Amazon AWS, and if you are skilled enough you can build your own VPN, and it is probably too small and rarely used to draw attention to itself. Here's a Wall Street Journal article on the topic (may be paywalled).

US Firewall?

But it's not like the US is blameless. It is clear that the government has been reading pretty much everything on the net, and you would be naive to believe any assurances that they've stopped beating their wife. Especially if the assurance comes from a politician who doesn't understand much about technology but is supposedly part of the oversight committee (the Internet is a series of tubes even has its own Wikipedia page). And doubly so if they are only allowed to perform their oversight in a locked room where they are not even allowed to take notes on what they read.

When the NSA gets caught intercepting and bugging Cisco routers in transit, why would anyone trust a Cisco router, or any American router?

Here’s how it works: shipments of computer network devices (servers, routers, etc,) being delivered to our targets throughout the world are intercepted. Next, they are redirected to a secret location where Tailored Access Operations/Access Operations (AO-S326) employees, with the support of the Remote Operations Center (S321), enable the installation of beacon implants directly into our targets’ electronic devices. These devices are then re-packaged and placed back into transit to the original destination. All of this happens with the support of Intelligence Community partners and the technical wizards in TAO.

Breaking News: While I was on the plane to China, EFF showed the results of its FOI inquiry that if you get your computer fixed at Geek Squad (Best Buy) they may show data on it to the FBI (even though they would need a warrant to look if it wasn't "shown" to them).  So far the only public case is child pornography, so it's hard to raise a lot of enthusiasm for the rights of child pornographers. But remember Niemöller's poem, first they came for the socialists... Think I'm being overdramatic? Apparently, Geek Squad has been working with the FBI for ten years, so who knows how deep the rathole goes already.

The New Walled Gardens

However, we seem to be starting to have new walled gardens in the rest of the world outside China.

Google used to be a search engine. If you wanted to know when your American Airlines flight would land, Google would point you to the right page on the AA website. Now, it just answers the question for you (and serves you some ads). Increasingly, it tries to answer the question it thinks you want answered. That's fine for you as a user, and in this case, you are just a cost if you go to the AA website and do anything other than buying a ticket.

Facebook and Twitter give you a feed of stuff you might be interested in, but mostly it keeps you on their site to see it. They have their own browsers built into their apps, for example.

For better or worse, we currently largely have an ad-supported web. I don't think it is supportable long-term for most sites. I went to some local newspaper yesterday, I forget which, but it wouldn't show me the article because I had an ad blocker turned on. But a model that works by charging third-parties to show me stuff I don't want to see (and I'm pretty good at not even looking at) doesn't seem supportable long term. However, arguably just that model worked for 50 years until ad blockers (aka DVRs) meant that only old people watched broadcast TV live (except sports). I gave up having a landline phone, not because of the cost, but because it got to the point that the only calls I ever got were people trying to sell me stuff, ads in effect. Anyone who knew me called my cellphone. My cellphone is almost at that point now though—anyone that knows me texts me so I don't usually answer my phone if it is a number I don't know.

It is all changing, of course. But if your business model is to be a news aggregator, that requires that there are at least some independently successful news sites to aggregate. There are only so many pictures of what your friends had for dinner that you can stomach.

So now we've gone from the net interpreting censorship as damage and routing around it, to it interpreting it as an attempt to avoid seeing ads and blocking access to the content.

The Long Castle

One question people have about the Great Wall of China (the stone one) is how Mongolians couldn't just cross it. In Chinese, it is called chang cheng (长城), which means long castle (or long city, or some other things, too). The purpose was to be able to move an army fast to where it was required, not to keep people out due to its being a wall. Plus control customs and immigration (insert your Trump joke here, or point out how old walls are). All this is just an excuse for a picture of me at Badaling. The blue sky is deceptive. It was December and freezing cold. Hence my clothes.

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