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China bans Youtube

reuters.com

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Re: China bans Youtube

#21

Post by electromagnetic »

megaduck wrote: post #10
petercooper wrote: post #5

Don't be too quick to blame this on political fear - China probably just wants to increase productivity in the workplace. Next on the chopping block.. Facebook, Digg, and Reddit.

Actually, you can blame this one directly on political fear. Recently, video footage of Chinese police savagely beating prone Tibetan protesters got posted onto YouTube. Next thing you know, WHAM! Blocked. There's a lot of precedent for this, too. The government blocked the whole iTunes store when a music single with the word "Tibet" in it hit the front page. They frequently ban news sites whenever news from Tibet (e…

I think it could also be that whenever something pops up they don't like they review the entire site. If someone says 'Free Tibet!' on blogger and it gets too popular, they'll block the whole of blogger until they've got their targets down to specific blogs and pages, then they can unblock the entire thing.

IMO, if they're doing that, it's a very smart system of reducing dissent. I completely disagree with it, but then I grew up in a western country. I'm also not too ignorant to call China evil for doing so, they've made colossal strides in the past 50 years and perhaps in the long run this will be good for the country as a whole, potentially the worst thing that could happen is a civil war involving 1.3 billion people.

Re: China bans Youtube

#22

Post by chiffonade »

phugoid wrote: post #20

The hard thing to bend my mind around is the fact that many people in China are in favour of Internet censorship. I have witnessed the same thing here in the UAE - even from young Western-educated locals. I suppose that if you grow up in a society where heavy-handed censorship is widespread in all media and even conversation, you'd accept it as normal and perhaps necessary. Self-censorship is even more effective and…

> Of course, he himself uses a VPN to dial out.

Sounds like class warfare. Same shit, different country.

Re: China bans Youtube

#23

Post by mdemare »

bk wrote: post #11

This is hardly big news. Sites rotate in and out of being blocked all the time. wikipedia, wordpress.com, news.bbc.co.uk, etc. have all been blocked at one point or another. The only mainstream site that's been consistently blocked is bbc news. Interestingly, no US news outlets are blocked. It always makes me wonder why. Also, the major cities tend to have more liberal access policies than more remote areas.

The bbc has an chinese language edition. Do the US news outlets?

Re: China bans Youtube

#24

Post by jacoblyles »

phugoid wrote: post #20

The hard thing to bend my mind around is the fact that many people in China are in favour of Internet censorship. I have witnessed the same thing here in the UAE - even from young Western-educated locals. I suppose that if you grow up in a society where heavy-handed censorship is widespread in all media and even conversation, you'd accept it as normal and perhaps necessary. Self-censorship is even more effective and…

China is less than a lifetime away from its last civil war. I can see how that would make people fearful and cautious.

Allowing populism to run a muck could lead to revolution, especially in a young and poor nation like China. Contrary to the romantic ideal of revolution we have in the West, in practice it is a bloody, miserable, and violent thing.

Call me a fascist, but I can understand the Chinese authorities' attempts to short-circuit anti-government movements. I can also understand popular support for such actions, given that the current Chinese government is more competent than all but a handful on this planet.

Also - I'm just trying to understand and explore their side here. I do enjoy living in a free society where I can support market anarchism and make frequent anti-government comments. I'm just not so much of an idealist to believe that American-style democracy is optimal for all places, times, and situations.

For example, I can understand why the Germans chose to ban Nazi publications in the wake of World War II, free speech be damned.

Re: China bans Youtube

#25

Post by eru »

chiffonade wrote: post #19
bk wrote: post #11

This is hardly big news. Sites rotate in and out of being blocked all the time. wikipedia, wordpress.com, news.bbc.co.uk, etc. have all been blocked at one point or another. The only mainstream site that's been consistently blocked is bbc news. Interestingly, no US news outlets are blocked. It always makes me wonder why. Also, the major cities tend to have more liberal access policies than more remote areas.

> It always makes me wonder why. This doesn't make me wonder at all. The US and China were the two biggest allies in World War 2, became economically unified during the cold war to defeat the Soviet Union (remember the Soviet Union?), and now are the two biggest economic powers in the world. Don't look at official GDP figures, they're meaningless. Look at influence, manufacturing/logistical and financial power center…

> Once the re-unification of Korea happens and there is a large source of inexpensive labor from the North for the developed economy in the South to employ, Japan will start its relative decline.

The historic example of German re-unification does point in another direction..

Re: China bans Youtube

#26

Post by eru »

utku_karatas wrote: post #13
Retric wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actuality, they don't say it works in Turkey only that: YouTube, which has country-specific sites in 23 countries, has in the past been blocked in certain countries, including Turkey which might suggest it currently works but does not say so. Anyway, while I don't think it's an issue with Turkey I expect China blocking YouTube might become a free trade issue.

You're right about Turkey, it's no free trade issue here. The bans are about our archaic laws allowing anyone to claim any site for being a threat to our national unity. And these lawsuits usually end up with banning the whole thing. At some point even Blogger.com was gone (probably because some smart-ass didn't like one post and issued a suit). And as for the inaccuracy of the write up, Youtube's status is quite fla…

> You're right about Turkey, it's no free trade issue here.

Yes. The last time I noticed, it was about the sexual orientation of the republic's founder, Mustafa Kemal Attatürk. Is that still current?

Re: China bans Youtube

#27

Post by bk »

mdemare wrote: post #23
bk wrote: post #11

This is hardly big news. Sites rotate in and out of being blocked all the time. wikipedia, wordpress.com, news.bbc.co.uk, etc. have all been blocked at one point or another. The only mainstream site that's been consistently blocked is bbc news. Interestingly, no US news outlets are blocked. It always makes me wonder why. Also, the major cities tend to have more liberal access policies than more remote areas.

The bbc has an chinese language edition. Do the US news outlets?

Only the news.bbc.co.uk subdomain (which is in English) was blocked, www.bbc.co.uk was fine, except for certain sub-pages.

Re: China bans Youtube

#28

Post by bk »

h34t wrote: post #16
bk wrote: post #11

This is hardly big news. Sites rotate in and out of being blocked all the time. wikipedia, wordpress.com, news.bbc.co.uk, etc. have all been blocked at one point or another. The only mainstream site that's been consistently blocked is bbc news. Interestingly, no US news outlets are blocked. It always makes me wonder why. Also, the major cities tend to have more liberal access policies than more remote areas.

For the year I was living there Flickr and Wikipedia were blocked 100% of the time.

Wikipedia was blocked completely for a long time, later they moved to blocking only certain pages (en.wikipedia.org, I think the Chinese version is still blocked entirely). For flickr only the image hosts (static.flickr.com) were blocked, which led to the strange experience of being able to browse an image sharing site with no images.

Re: China bans Youtube

#29

Post by utku_karatas »

eru wrote: post #26
utku_karatas wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right about Turkey, it's no free trade issue here. The bans are about our archaic laws allowing anyone to claim any site for being a threat to our national unity. And these lawsuits usually end up with banning the whole thing. At some point even Blogger.com was gone (probably because some smart-ass didn't like one post and issued a suit). And as for the inaccuracy of the write up, Youtube's status is quite fla…

> You're right about Turkey, it's no free trade issue here. Yes. The last time I noticed, it was about the sexual orientation of the republic's founder, Mustafa Kemal Attatürk. Is that still current?

AFAICR, yes, that was the first tide of the neverending banning wave - an insulting song about Ataturk whose legacy is protected strictly by the current law. I've no clue what the latest reason is though.

Re: China bans Youtube

#30

Post by dinkumthinkum »

petercooper wrote: post #15
dinkumthinkum wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got to be kidding. Stifling another outlet for free speech is just to get a few more widgets produced per day right? Of course it has nothing to do with political fear, even though every other instance of such an action did. Right, you can't be serious.

Yes, I was kidding. I just didn't realize the ;-) on the end was necessary this time because it was such a ridiculous comment ;-)

Sorry. :) You wouldn't believe how many morons actually think like that when it comes to China though.
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