

Living in China, let me tell you what life is like with restricted internet - thenextcorner
http://www.reddit.com/r/SOPA/comments/o7t40/as_someone_living_in_china_let_me_tell_you_what/

======
Dn_Ab
In the thread one point that was being argued for was that the restrictions
did nothing to piracy, people could still buy or acquire the goods somehow.

This is just a specific instance of the fact that banning something will just
force it underground, make it harder to track, make acquisition become a
gamble on authenticity/safety and create negative economic consequences.

In countries where easy download is not possible (either due to restrictions
on access or third world lack of internet) the more amoral technologically
advantaged start charging rent for access. All they have to do is download and
charge something far less than the retail price. If SOPA does succeed in
making online piracy harder, it creates an imbalance of power beyond just
concentrating authoritarian levels of control in the hands of a few; it also
opens up those whose priorities are not in tech to exploitation.

Money that could have been spent within the productive economy (not
necessarily on the product) is now diverted to the hidden markets, possibly
indirectly funding operations with more overhead. The fact that where access
to internet is restricted, such as in third world countries, people are still
willing to pay above zero but unwilling to pay at retail suggests a pricing
mismatch and that there might be a set of conditions where people will pay at
a profit. It also suggests the piracy problem will be compounded as it grows
more heads, gets more complicated, gets driven underground and becomes more
hazardous. Malware authors may be rubbing their hands in anticipation of
writing movie downloading or subscription sites.

If I were to define a minimal basis for which people decide to torrent
something its: [level of want, ease of legal access, relative cost of legal
access, benefits of legal access, ease of pirating, cost of pirating, weighted
odds of getting caught * cost of getting caught]. What SOPA is trying to do is
make the cost of catching people illegally sharing super high. Except its not
going to work because the infringers are not directly affected by the actual
consequences. This is part of why it is hard to explain the consequences to a
lay person.

What the producers need to focus on is to increase the ease and benefits of
legal access and price reasonably. You can't effectively charge for
information. But you can charge for information laced with convenience. People
are risk avoiding and are even happy to buy things when they aren't treated
worse than the actual infringers. For example, the ease and benefits from
buying games on steam so completely dwarfs the ease of piracy that I prefer to
not pirate a game even when I think the cost is too high because it is just
not worth the hassle and I have experienced something better. I'd rather wait
for a sale or prices to drop. I believe most people with a stable monetary
situation would actually prefer to not "have" to pirate.

The argument of whether you are entitled to information you cannot access
(e.g. tv shows in U.S. not appearing in Europe or overly expensive) is
orthogonal and based on personal ethics. The practical reality is enough
people will pirate if the conditions are right and there are those who weigh
cost above all else - all the money "lost" to them could never have been
gotten at a profit in the first place. Rather than whining and holding the
internet hostage, the goal should be to maximize conversion and retention of
those who can be reasonably swayed to buy while minimizing your costs as a
business.

Is this a case of the big publishers committing something akin to the sunk
cost fallacy?

~~~
elinws
"...the restrictions did nothing to piracy, people could still buy or acquire
the goods somehow."

China today is the Spain of the 16th century.

In the 15th century Spain was a super power. The printing press was invented.
Luther, the first media evangelist, frightened the Roman Catholic Church. As
part of the inquisition, Spain suppressed the press. As a result, while common
people in Protestant countries learned to read and changed the way they
produced things, inventing amongst other things, capitalism, Spanish common
people did not. Her economy was wreaked. Spain is only now recovering from the
suppression of the press.

Some historians will point out that Spain had an active black market, so
people could get whatever books they wanted easily. However, to benefit from
the black market you have to have learned to read and innovation comes up from
the bottom. Literate weavers and felt makers invented capitalism, not dukes,
counts, and baronets.

In an information revolution, the context with the freest information wins.
Success - economic, cultural, military or political - will go to the most
innovative context and innovation comes from information freedom. This is as
true today as it was in the printing press information revolution.

SOPA is the beginning of our road to becoming Spain.

------
anto1ne
Chinese internet is like the rest of internet. Chinese people don't care about
censorship of external sites, because they don't care about them, the same way
you don't care about youku, weibo, kaixin, taobao, etc.. you use youtube, they
use youku. And whoever want to bypass censorship can buy a vpn (they're easy
to find and reliable). The only thing that can be said about internet in china
is that it's dead slow for a foreigner, but that's due to bad overseas
connections and L7 filtering. If you go on chinese sites, it's totally ok. I
stayed 3 years in china, and was 24/7 on vpn.

~~~
JoshTriplett
That seems like the entire point: China's firewall tries to create a Chinese
internet consisting of people in China browsing sites in China. The internet
doesn't work that way. While sites with country-specific audiences do exist,
for the most part everyone browses the same Internet. Sites like Baidu, Youku
(a YouTube clone), Weibo (a Twitter clone), and other sites hosted in China
benefit greatly from the firewall. Without the firewall, those sites would
still have an audience, but they'd compete heavily with the much larger
audiences on the sites they cloned.

~~~
jhancock
There are multiple facets to the GWF's raison d'être. Most touched on in this
thread. One area not given much voice is China's desire to handle legal issues
in its domain. If you want a web site in China, you have to have a person
(usually through a company) that is the agent responsible for the site. This
person must be a Chinese national. That person is the one that has to show up
in court if the site/company gets sued. If China is serious about nurturing
its legal system, its a perfectly valid approach that parties conducting
business in China be required to answer to the legal system when required.
This means that if Facebook wants to serve up to Chinese people, they need a
Chinese company and agree to be subject to Chinese law for what they serve up
in China. Many may not agree with the restrictions on what you can serve up,
but this is a different aspect of the GWF.

~~~
JoshTriplett
I don't consider that a "perfectly valid approach". It precisely matches what
the US wants to do with SOPA: regulate foreign sites in absentia and block
them if they don't comply.

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introspectif
Most comments here are dead on:

1.) Youtube, Twitter, Facebook... blocked 2.) Google... rerouted to HK and
still censored 3.) Gmail... increasingly unreliable 4.) Chinese mostly don't
care, but only because of length of time that the situation has endured. China
runs on 'Guanxi', or relationships. In other words, rampant nepotism and
(sometimes) thinly veiled corruption. You start company Y competing with
foreign company X. You get the government to block company X's service in
China. Within a fairly short amount of time, your company's site dominates,
and people mostly forget about the foreign competitor. 5.) Foreigners are
generally not bothered when using VPNs (I have had excellent experience with
one in particular, but avoid posting it publicly for obvious reasons).
Assuming, of course, the use is apolitical. 6.) Young Chinese web users have
developed conventions for speaking about sensitive topics in ways that
(somewhat) evade censorship, such as using homophones, metaphors, etc. 7.) The
general atmosphere in China, as regards the censorship, contains less
animosity than most westerners would assume. Most web users understand that
censors are just doing their job, and occasionally even speak to censors
directly in their social network site posts, such as to make a plea to leave
the post up for just a little bit longer before censoring it. 8.) In general
people in China do desire change, but they're largely pragmatic about it.
They've seen incredible progress in their lifetime, and though there are
occasional steps backward that are frustrating, the overall march still tends
to be in the right general direction (the nature of information - it naturally
breeds freedom, bringing access to more information, and thus more freedom, in
a virtuous cycle). Young Chinese people are often more informed about
political issues than young westerners, through their prolific use of social
networking sites (yes - even more than their counterparts in more developed
nations).

Ah, back to the point... use a good VPN, and all will be well.

------
Shenglong
I go back to China quite often, and I've never had Google blocked for me.
Facebook has been blocked on occasion, and most blog sites are, but it's
honestly never been that problematic.

I hate SOPA too, but tying SOPA to the restrictions currently in China is
absolutely inaccurate. SOPA's main objective (regardless of whether it'll
actually do this) would be to attack pirating sites. In China, they don't
really care about pirating. Even mid-sized companies and internet cafes use
illegal software. When you ask if it's "real" you get a response that's
something like "of course it's real, you can use it."

internet censorship is used for a completely different reason, and should
_not_ be compared.

~~~
xiaoma
> _I go back to China quite often, and I've never had Google blocked for me.
> Facebook has been blocked on occasion, and most blog sites are, but it's
> honestly never been that problematic._

China has changed since you (apparently) grew up or lived here. There hasn't
been a single day in years that I've found YouTube, facebook, Twitter or any
of the major blogging sites have been open. Google is generally blocked only
for sensitive terms, cache or queries with too many ? query terms in the URL.
Gmail, on the other hand is becoming less and less reliable. The internet is
barely usable for international sites, especially now that everyone is putting
facebook and twitter buttons all over the place.

It's worth pointing out that the pain described above is caused through
centralized control of DNS servers... which is exactly what SOPA would create
in the US.

Also, in my experience internet cafes don't claim to have 正版 (as you put it
"real") software when they don't. They would think you were a bit odd for
caring though.

~~~
wisty
You need adblock to self-censor. Otherwise every site with Facebook's trojans
(i.e. "Like" buttons) will hang while you try to access facebook's blocked
domains.

~~~
zizee
Or ghostery <http://www.ghostery.com/>.

------
j4pe
Chinese internet censorship is driven by the Party's need to remain in
control, not by corporations seeking intellectual property protection. Little
effort is made by Chinese censors to protect copyright holders' content.
Though the parallel feels right, the rampant copyright infringement in China
cannot be called a result of its internet controls. SOPA has nothing to do
with the Great Firewall.

Having spent a long time in China, I can see the dangers of the censorship
enabled by SOPA. But I also know that, should the Party decide to eliminate
piracy, they could do so. There's simply no incentive right now - it would be
an unpopular policy that would largely benefit foreign firms.

~~~
PakG1
That's true, but the content providers seem to start respecting content IP on
their own. Youku, Tudou, Baidu, all have started to do this. A Chinese law
professor blogger I read says that this is probably because those companies
are publicly listed in the US, so not good to bite the hand that feeds you.

------
runn1ng
Can I ask - didn't Australia had something like SOPA too?

I vaguely remember some list of banned Australian sites being leaked on
Wikileaks, and some videos about abortion and really random sites being on
that list. Do someone knows more?

~~~
Joakal
Internet censorship is now alive in Australia since June-ish 2011.

Most of the biggest ISPs voluntarily adopted Interpol list. And made it
mandatory for their customers (I left). Seems odd that they would risk being
censorship companies, but there's government money involved to those that do
filter Internet.

Long-term, the subscriptions from mandatory censored Internet will be cheaper
than Internet freedom subscriptions, so those Freedom ISPs will exit the
market.

My next prediction to the Internet censorship: To be eligible to resell NBN,
the ISP must have appropriate criminal content filters in place. Making the
Freedom ISPs languish behind in the one digit megabit era.

------
Robelius
There is something that I have not seen in any SOPA argument, something that
should stick out in this written work on Chinese censorship....our ability to
vote. "don_chow" talks about how oppressive the Chinese government. The
comments then go into how Congress is attempting to restrict the American
people, when it is the opposite. We are restricting ourselves.

I cannot speak on a case by case, but it's hard to argue against the idea that
most Americans do not vote. We turn on the TV to CNN, Fox, MSNBC, or whatever
you chose. We hear people debate on an issue with the majority in the small
debate arguing in your viewpoint. All people do after that is yell at the TV
saying "YHA!" then go to bed. We do not take action.

We let the law makers do their job, but when they don't do something we agree
with we talk about how bad they are. Then the next big story comes the
following week and we are then talking about that. We don't take a stand and
speak with what law makers truly care about, our vote.

Law makers create these laws to get lobbiest dollars so that they can run for
reelection. However, they wouldn't do these kinds of things if they knew that
they won't get that end result, the vote which in turn gives a reelection. If
they knew that the electorate within their district or state would put in the
effort to research representative/senators then Congress wouldn't try to pass
something like this.

The unfortunate truth is that our representative/senators are right. They know
that we take little to know action. SOPA is an extremely rare case where the
American people actually get up and get involved in government. I agree that
SOPA must be stopped, but I also believe that SOPA would not even be here if
the American people did their job in the first place and got involved. We can
send our men and women around the world to let other nations have the right to
vote, yet we can't walk across the street to do it ourselves.

The ironic thing is, the majority of people who do agree with what I say will
say "YHA!" and continue surfing the web. Sorry if my thoughts are unorganized,
but I am extremely tired and have a headache. I know I am missing a lot of
issues I want to hit, but I can get to them in another comment :)

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Until we shift the cash balance away from deep corporate pockets, it is going
to matter little how involved people get in politics. Unfortunately, I can't
see the kind of reform that would take (and I've seen at least one good idea
for it) happening. Those corporate dollars have to much to lose if they can't
be spent owning the government.

All hail your new corporate overlords. Makes me want to make my company be
successful just so I can have a say in my government. :(

------
kaixi
Two years ago, I stayed in Shanghai for 6 months and my personal experience
indicates that most Chinese people don't care about internet censorship.

To understand this, you should first know that internet in China is a whole
ecosystem of its own, pretty much like a giant intranet. For every website
that's blocked by the government (Facebook, Twitter, etc) there's a Chinese
alternative available, such as Renren and Sina Weibo. Everyone uses these
alternative sites, and people don't really feel that their online experience
is being restricted.

European and American people who go to China have a hard time adapting
themselves though.

~~~
chrischen
Read chinasmack.com translated comments. If they're indicative at all, then
they seem to realize that they are constantly being censored and "harmonized"
on these Chinese controlled sites.

------
thornbush
Living in the United States of America, let me tell you what life is like with
restricted internet

~~~
gcb
... movie coming out this summer

------
ximeng
Something that I don't see mentioned much is that China also restricts access
to Chinese sites, probably partly to stop foreign countries complaining about
copyright violations. Many videos are geo-restricted to be visible in China
only, the same is true for music download sites.

Less people raise this because more Western people want to access Western
content from China than want to access Chinese content from the West, but it
is another issue affecting free exchange of culture. It's also not as
straightforward to get a VPN into China as it is to get one out of China. Not
to mention that this annoys Chinese students studying abroad who want to watch
TV from home.

~~~
nekojima
"China also restricts access to Chinese sites, probably partly to stop foreign
countries complaining about copyright violations"

More often than not it is because the Chinese site is in competition with a
state owned or controlled competitor who wants to hobble its competitor, or
there is a power shift within the regulating authority or relevant ministry
and competing state owned or controlled sites are using their party proxies to
hurt another local site for their own gain.

~~~
ximeng
Not sure about this. Over the past two or three years, ku6, ppstream, youku,
tudou, and Tencent TV all started georestriction. It seems there's some
government restriction in play.

~~~
nekojima
Just chatting to a senior exec at one of those sites and he said for them it
was in part because they don't get ad revenues from viewers outside of
mainland and the cost of external bandwidth was too high to service overseas
Chinese and others viewing the videos, for which they get little or no
monetary benefit.

~~~
ximeng
This makes sense, as I think Westerners cottoned on to the fact you can watch
popular Western movies on these sites for free, even if you have little
interest in Chinese KFC and Nutri-express adverts.

------
dataminer
Once you have experienced the open internet, the restricted internet is quite
suffocating. Whats more disappointing is that governments in most places
around the world are converging towards the Chinese style of access controls
and restrictions.

------
emehrkay
Sounds like browsing form a fortune 1000 company, or my days at work.

------
robryan
What shaped the attitude to piracy in china? Just thinking about it I guess
many Chinese people probably wouldn't be able to afford media, especially
stuff from western countries.

------
beedogs
I've always maintained that China is about 10 years ahead of the US in terms
of transition to a surveillance society. (The UK is 5 years ahead of the US.)

------
gcb
Nice. So people are forced to set up their own mail services and all.

Much more secure than assuming some corporation will value your data. Or that
dropbox is secure in any way.

Irony apart. 100% of digital goods in China are pirated. That goes along a
great way to show how effective internet censorship is for piracy.

On the other hand, most south American countries have free internet (as in
speech) and 90% of video games there, even consoles, are pirated.

I'm going to put my money that income controls pirating better than anything
else.

~~~
shasta
Do you think stopping piracy of foreign IP is a big concern for the Chinese
government? I don't think it's fair to say that this proves that censorship
doesn't stop piracy, when that probably isn't a goal (my guess is the Chinese
government would prefer piracy over buying licenses overseas).

~~~
Natsu
They're not really any more effective at stopping the spread of politically
embarrassing material. If anything, people openly joke about how they have a
河蟹 ("river crab") society (a pun on 和谐 / harmonious).

As an example, look up the story behind the catchphrase "我爸是李刚."

[http://www.chinasmack.com/glossary#%E6%88%91%E7%88%B8%E6%98%...](http://www.chinasmack.com/glossary#%E6%88%91%E7%88%B8%E6%98%AF%E6%9D%8E%E5%88%9A)

