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Chinese E-Commerce Tops $38.5 Billion; What Comes Next?

cgseo — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:30:00 +0000

Last September, China's most successful consumer-to-consumer online marketplace, Taobao.com launched a massive online promotion. By offering exorbitantly low prices on a series of brand name consumer electronics by Lenovo, HP, Philips and others, the site attracted 1.8 billion visitors (non-unique) - the equivalent of every single person in China visiting the site at least once. With 145 million online shoppers expected by the end of 2010, e-commerce in China has come a long way since it began about a decade ago. What types of business models exist? Who's shopping online and what are they buying? And where do we go from here? Sponsor Guest author Joel Backaler writes The China Observer , an award-winning blog focused on Chinese technology trends and consumer culture. His writing has appeared in and he has been quoted by the Wall Street Journal China Journal, BusinessWeek, and Seeking Alpha. Joel is a Mandarin-speaking former Fulbright Fellow who has worked and lived in Taipei, Beijing and Singapore with Frontier Strategy Group. Follow Joel on Twitter . How did it all begin? Jack Ma and his partners launched Chinese e-commerce in 1998 with Alibaba.com , a business-to-business online platform. Like the Web firms of Silicon Valley, Chinese firms felt the shockwaves of the Internet bubble bursting in early 2000 - but in China the Internet industry continued to grow. 2003 was a turning point for Chinese e-commerce with the release of Alipay, Alibaba's version of PayPal, which provided a secure means for online payment. 2003 also marked the first entry of Western multinationals in the Chinese e-commerce market - first by Ebay taking a controlling stake in Eachnet, and then with Amazon subsequently doing the same with Joyo.com in 2004. Roles reversed in 2005 when Alibaba Group gained control over Yahoo!'s Chinese search platform. A period of explosive growth began in 2008 as China's e-commerce market grew to 100 billion RMB, with 80 million online shoppers. Where are we today? In 2009, China's e-commerce market totaled 263 billion RMB (approximately $38.5 billion) with growth equivalent to about 105% increase year-on-year. Currently, consumer-to-consumer (C2C) represents the largest segment of China's e-commerce market; however, business-to-consumer (B2C) is increasingly growing in importance due to two trends. Traditional Retailer to Online Retailer : Traditional retailers are developing e-commerce platforms as additional channels to get consumers to buy their products. From brand name domestic retailers to state-owned enterprises, there is a major push to go online. It has even been reported that Wal-Mart is set to release its own e-commerce platform for the Chinese and Japanese markets . Individual Seller to Online Retailer : Due to the extreme success of particular sellers on existing C2C sites like Taobao.com, online shops that began with a single college student or a small family have been forced to seek out additional support to satisfy market demand. As a result, these one-time, single-person operations have been incorporating into formal enterprises stepping into the B2C space. What types of business models exist? China's e-commerce platforms can be classified by the following three models: marketplace model, online retail model and traditional retail model. Marketplace Model : The marketplace model connects buyers and sellers, whether it is business-to-business or C2C. The company provides a platform to facilitate business between two parties but has no products of its own to offer. It maintains a searchable database of information for buyers and seller to connect, and a secure means to facilitate payment between both parties. Top B2B players : Alibaba.com, HC360.com, Myekoo.com Top C2C players : Taobao.com, Paipai.com, Eachnet.com Online Retail Model : The online retail model is where a company has no formal real-world storefront. It provides both products and a channel to sell directly to end customers. Top B2C Online Retailers : 360buy.com , Joyo.com, Dangdang.com Traditional Retail Model : The traditional retail model is similar to the online retail model; however, in addition to the online website the company also has real-world retail outlets. Top B2C Traditional Retailers : Gome (electronics), COFCO (state-owned: food and beverage), Lining (athletic apparel) Who's shopping online and what are they buying? Shanghai-based iResearch estimates that by the end of 2010 there will be 145 million online shoppers in China. Online shoppers are relatively young - the majority are between the ages of 18 and 35. While this number is split roughly evenly, slightly more women shop than men. In the early days of Chinese e-commerce, products such as software and DVDs were the top purchases. Currently clothing, books and cosmetics are the top sellers. Additionally, as we have seen in the U.S. with sites like Etsy, companies that focus on niche markets are also sprouting up. For example, 21Cake.com is a popular made-to-order online cake company that sells custom-made cakes online and delivers to China's major cities. Where do we go from here? China's e-commerce market is yet to fully mature, but it is entering a period of high-speed growth. C2C sellers that are growing more successful will begin to establish more formal companies, leading to an increase in the number of companies in China's B2C space. While many view the Internet as a sensitive area subject to regulation by the Chinese government, the government supports e-commerce due to its economic benefit and potential for job creation. One example is Xinjiang, a remote province in western China which recently experienced social unrest. Most websites and email there are blocked - but you can still access Alibaba.com and Taobao.com. Of China's e-commerce companies, Alibaba Group will remain the company to watch in this space for many years to come. However, there is still a lot of room for niche operators to capitalize on the growth potential of China's e-commerce market. Image by Kim2402 . Discuss

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Chinese E-Commerce Tops $38.5 Billion; What Comes Next?

Lenovo: Mobile will be 10-20% of Revenue in 5 Years

cgseo — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 15:16:35 +0000

PC maker Lenovo announced today that the company expects its mobile Internet products to account for 10%-20% of revenue in five years' time. This statement comes from President and COO, Rory Read, delivered at a media briefing that coincided with the launch of the newest Lenovo "LePhone" smartphone device in China. With the phone, a handset running the Google Android mobile OS, Lenovo hopes to grab a good-sized chunk of the still-emerging Chinese smartphone market. Sponsor Interestingly enough, Lenovo had, in early 2008, sold off its mobile phone unit to focus solely on its PC business. But as the financial crisis hit, companies delayed refreshing their corporate desktops and laptops in an effort to save money, a move which heavily impacted Lenovo's bottom line. Last year, the company decided to once again diversify their offerings by bringing back the mobile unit. In January, Lenovo launched an improved "Ophone" device at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, its first smartphone since the $200 million reacquisition of the once-discarded mobile business, returned to the company in November of last year. At the time, Lenovo execs said the phone would be central to the company's mobile strategy. Today, they're echoing that sentiment. According to Chief Executive Yang Yuanqing, mobile Internet devices will overtake traditional PCs in the next five years. And Read reminded everyone that the smartphone market in China was only now emerging. "It's just the beginning," he said. PC Manufacturers Focused on Mobile Lenovo isn't the only PC manufacturer making changes in this direction, with smartphone launches laser-focused on China especially. Dell, for example, announced in November they would launch an Android-based handset called the Dell Mini 3 that would be sold only in Brazil and China to start. The company is also hard at work on an Android tablet, a colorful consumer-targeted device apparently being called the "Dell Streak." Acer, too, has a line of smartphones running both the Windows Mobile OS and Android, available outside the U.S. in parts of Europe and Asia. HP, although still more focused on PCs, is set to launch its first "new-wave" tablet in the form of the HP Slate , a multi-touch lightweight device running Windows 7.

Twitter’s Translation Problem

cgseo — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:00:00 +0000

For all the hype and all the discussion, the thousands of apps surrounding the service and our constant amazement at how fast or slow it grows, one point noted in a Twitter blog last night might bring us all back down to Earth for a moment - Twitter just became multilingual less than six months ago. If you're wondering, there are as many, if not more, Spanish speakers in the world as English. While Twitter is bragging about its expanding international audience , the next time you find yourself wondering why the service hasn't absolutely exploded on the worldwide stage, look at its translation issues. Sponsor Now, this wasn't the main point of Twitter's blog post , which tells us that more than 60% of Twitter accounts come from outside the U.S. But, it didn't seem like a rather noteworthy point. According to the company, the addition of a Spanish-language Twitter website saw an "immediate 50% boost in signups from Spanish-speaking countries." After the earthquake in Chile, signups "spiked 1200% and nearly all of those were using Spanish as their language." The reason we make this comparison is to remind ourselves of how infantile Twitter really is. We compare it to Facebook all too often, and that much-repeated statistic of 400 million users, but we don't bother to note that Facebook is also translated into more than 60 languages . So, while Twitter is not only striving to reach mainstream America, it is still only offered in two languages and it's a bit of a surprise that it's become as international a service as it has. While the blog brags that Indian politicians have spurned a recent growth in India, the country is also host the second largest number of English speakers worldwide. Jack Dorsey on Translation When ReadWriteWeb founder Richard MacManus recently spoke with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and artist, architectural designer, activist and blogger Ai Weiwei , the question of translating Twitter was a central theme of the discussion. "Why don't you provide a Chinese language access to Twitter? Once you have this, you will have 100 times more audience," asked Ai Weiwei. "Is it possible for you to provide Chinese access to Twitter? I need a clear answer, yes or no." "I would say yes, its just a matter of time," replied Dorsey. "It's a matter of getting over techinical restraints." Dorsey explained that translation was an issue of scale and said that, just as was the case with Facebook, Twitter was being translated by its users. Dorsey admitted that if Twitter were translated into a local language, the people would immediately understand it, but that "it's a major failing of the technology right now that it's not." "The end goal," Dorsey said "is end-to-end translation in every language." Our own Frederic Lardinois detailed Dorsey's explanation of the translation setbacks on Twitter: According to Dorsey, it is just a question of time and mostly a technological issue. Given Twitter's problems with scaling the service, making it work for every character set creates some issues for Twitter because of the legacy framework that Twitter established in its early days. Currently, the company doesn't really have the resources to devote to this. Doresey did, however, argue that users already know how the service is meant to work and understand the setup of the Twitter page. We do have to ask - how hard is it to translate the little text we actually interact with on Twitter? Facebook, with all of its advertising pages, account pages, settings pages, and whatever else, is absolutely huge. Twitter, on the other hand, is rather small. We're pretty sure Twitter would have no problem finding some Chinese speakers to translate the login page and the account settings and whatever else, pro bono. And, as noted in the conversation with MacManus, Ai Weiwei and Dorsey, the benefits of a more translated Twitter could be world-changing. What say you, Twitter? We say get to it. Discuss

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Twitter's Translation Problem

International Politics Slow Cloud Computing In Europe and Asia

cgseo — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 05:42:07 +0000

It's worth noting that the cloud certainly has borders. It's the one reality that proves the cloud computing movement may seem at times abstract and vague but in the end it is the international politics of our world that creates some of the deepest issues for its place in the world markets. According to InformationWeek , The 451 Group presented a webcast that showed cloud computing adoption trails in Europe and Asia. About 57% op spending is in the United States with 31% in Europe and 12% in Asia. The numbers get even more polarized when you only look at the adoption for infrastructure as a service. A full 93% of spending is in the United States with 6% in Europe and 1% in the United States. Sponsor The low numbers almost makes it seem like some artificial effect is in play. And in some ways it really is. A lack of European data centers services by the large providers affects adoption. Rackspace, Terremark and Savvis are the primary companies looking to develop a presence in Europe. But they need to build data centers before they can have any real presence there. According to the 451 Group, 99 percent of European businesses are either small or mid-sized organizations. And they have plenty of choices from telecommunications providers. But here is an interesting twist. InformationWeek: One obstacle to both sides is the U.S. Patriot Act, which gives the U.S. government a right to demand data if it defines conditions as being an emergency or necessary to homeland security, and a measure that contradicts that power when the data is of European origin, the European Union's Data Protection Directive. In 2006, the European Court of Justice ruled that an agreement negotiated with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was too broadly construed and violated the EU's directive. The agreement was about sharing data on European airline passengers headed for the U.S. The data sought by the U.S. was too broadly construed and violated the EU's directive, the court said. "Both measures could prevent establishing a cloud without borders," said 451's William Fellows. Cloud advocates say services established via an Internet data center should be accessible by people around the world, and they are in the case of Google search or Facebook apps. But when it comes to sensitive data, national borders still prevail because of conflicting laws." The issue is apparent now with Google's issues with the Chinese government. It's not the technology that is making cloud computing an issue. It's international politics. Discuss

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International Politics Slow Cloud Computing In Europe and Asia

Yahoo Hacked in China: Journalists, Others Affected

cgseo — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 03:27:06 +0000

Associated Press initially reported that three foreign journalists and one analyst have seen their email accounts hacked into today. The New York Times subsequently reported that there were "at least a dozen rights activists, academics and journalists who cover China," including the author Andrew Jacobs. AP: "They were greeted with messages saying, 'We've detected an issue with your account' and were told to contact Yahoo, they said Tuesday. Yahoo technicians told one of the four that his account had been hacked and restored his access, but it was not clear if the other instances were related." Sponsor Jacobs reported that "hackers altered (his) e-mail settings so that all correspondence was surreptitiously forwarded to another e-mail address." Among those affected were Clifford Coonan of Variety magazine and Kathleen McLaughlin, a freelancer. Agence France Presse reported that Yahoo! was avoiding directly addressing the hacks, saying only that it "condemns all cyberattacks regardless of origin or purpose." Yahoo! was roundly condemned for hurriedly turning over user information on reporter Shi Tao to the Chinese security forces in 2005. Their actions resulted in a long prison term for Shi for sharing Chinese media coverage policy with foreign sources. The late U.S. Congressman Tom Lantos called CEO Jerry Yang a "moral pygmy" for his collusion and subsequent slippery excuse-making. Earlier today, intermittent blocking of Google was reported in the country. China has the most sophisticated and widespread online censorship regime in the world, dovetailing social measures, criminal statutes and electronic measures. Additionally, some believe that government-sponsored, or at least encouraged, hackers have been behind multiple attacks on the properties of foreign companies, like the one that occasioned Google's surprising announcement of its intended withdrawal from China in January. Discuss

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Yahoo Hacked in China: Journalists, Others Affected

The Day EveryBlock Came to Town

cgseo — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 22:46:48 +0000

A fight just broke out down the street from my house. Yesterday, a dog in my neighborhood had one of its legs amputated. That's the kind of news I like to know and so I'm very excited that MSNBC's hyper-local news aggregator EveryBlock has expanded this week to include services in Portland, Oregon. EveryBlock is one of scores of competing services that serve up public records, social media content and local announcements on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood, or in this case block-by-block, basis. What does it mean when the most successful of these services rolls into your town? 12 hours into the experience, here's what some people in the local (human) media geeks have to say about it. This conversation offers a unique view into the front-line battle to offer news consumers more and faster information about our own neighborhoods than we've probably ever had before. Sponsor Does existing local media consider EveryBlock a threat? Local TV news personality and new media experimenter Stephanie Stricklen doesn't. "I can't think of any reason why it's not awesome," she told us. "Any time you bring another source of information into a city, especially one where you can access info about such a small geographic perspective, I like that." "No matter what you think of online journalism, everything is changing and the more players that come to the table the better we are all. We serve different audiences. The local TV stations could never have the time to visit every single block every day, there's not enough people, not even the newspaper could." Might local human reporters use a service like EveryBlock to find stories they should investigate and put in context? "Absolutely," Stricklen said, "I can see myself using something like this." As I write this story, some kind of animal problem has been reported at an intersection near where I live and an experimental short film screening was just blogged about by a neighborhood arts organization. The films aren't my style, to be frank, but I love that I am aware of the event. In fact, many of the updates from public records are maddeningly unclear. Many others are so trivial that lots of readers wouldn't consider them news. The health department visited the Chinese restaurant down the street and found the ice-scooper stuck handle-side down in the ice machine! Some lady on Yelp said she didn't like the tapas restaurant. Someone just flagged down a police car, but EveryBlock has no idea what it was about. To this EveryBlock's Dan O'Neil says: "Are there gaps in EveryBlock's knowledge? Yes. Are there gaps in human knowledge in real life? Yes! There's a comment field, help us out!" Is this a newswire of completed stories? No, this is something different. (But it is a complete publishing of the public records your taxpayer funded agencies make available, O'Neil points out.) To be honest, I like reading that kind of stuff. Maybe you do too. As O'Neil says, "we do have a wider definition of what news is." Not everyone feels satisfied with the level of detail being provided or the absence of filtering the signal from the noise. It's hard to imagine machines replacing the human storytelling that journalists provide. The machines could augment that journalism, though, and there's lots of room for them to do an even better job of it. Where Humans and Machine Work Together EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty told us in January that the organization had hired a full-time editor to research various government agency codes in order to articulate public records in a more human-readable way. "It's one thing to publish public records; it's another to make sense of them," he said. EveryBlock's O'Neil told us that editor's name is Paul Wilson and said Paul put in hours interviewing Portland municipal staff in order to translate the data fields the city publishes into the format EveryBlock now publishes. O'Neil says those municipal staff members are unsung heroes, especially Rick Nixon of the Bureau of Technology Services. "It's a very complex endeavor to publish regularly updated data," O'Neil says. "Portland has excellent meta data and contact info, but a lot of times it's hard to get to the expertise and for those experts to explain it to someone else. When it's not your job to answer phone calls from web developers and tell them what spreadsheets mean, it's tough. We're in a weird gap time. In the future the expectations and questions we bring to data will be more common and it will be a part of peoples' job descriptions - but the people in Portland should be commended for already really trying to figure out what these things mean." Portland makes a lot of this data officially available as part of its brand-new CivicApps program, but EveryBlock worked with the county restaurant inspection agency to get that data in particular through other channels. "We're cycling through 5,000 restaurants on a nightly basis," O'Neil says, "and the restaurant inspections in Portland are the most plain language content of all the cities we look at. It's great to see those people speaking in human and not just municipal language." Home-Team Geeks "What will be really exciting is to see what Portland's indigenous community of developers and web journos do with the content the city is making available," says Steve Suo, editor and executive VP of Portland's real-time, white-label EveryBlock competitor NozzlMedia . Nozzl is made up of long-time newspaper guys, now building something for the future. (See our write up of Nozzl: " Welcome to the Age of Robot Reporters ".) EveryBlock's arrival in town happened just days after the city's celebrated opening of a substantial amount of new data through CivicApps, and with help from the city. Nozzl thinks it can do a better job of putting this data into context. "The more eyes you have on the data, the more insights we'll see brought to bear," Suo says. "We're currently adding all the same Portland data for our Portland metro news customers," Nozzl co-founder and CEO Steve Woodward says. Woodward says that in addition to prioritizing context and serving white-label customers, Nozzl pulls from more sources of data, covers a broader geographic area, and focuses on real-time data. "EveryBlock will tell you what crimes occurred near your home over the last several days. Nozzl will give you information about that siren you hear at this very moment." EveryBlock's O'Neil basically says bring it on , pointing to Portland's mere five minute delay on 911 call data and his site's real-time bulletin feature. These are remarkable times. There are services like EveryBlock, Nozzl, Outside.in , Fwix and more all battling it out to best serve us users with new and innovative ways to drill down into more details about our immediate physical surroundings. EveryBlock is the biggest player in the game, though, and our awareness of hyper-local news here in tech-savvy Portland has probably been changed for good. Discuss

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The Day EveryBlock Came to Town

Google Brings Twitter Search Results to China

cgseo — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:22:10 +0000

It's been nearly a year since China first shutdown access to Twitter in preparation for the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre , but today Google has opened up the doors again, in a way. According to an article this morning in the Los Angeles Times, Google has added Twitter search results to its search engine there, "in effect, lifting a nine-month blackout of the microblogging service in China." Sponsor Earlier this week, Google announced that it would stop censoring search results and would redirect visitors from mainland China to Google.com.hk from Google.cn. Already, China has worked to censor search results provided on Google.com.hk. This latest move by Google is sure to further aggravate an already tense situation, but we have to wonder, as we have before , if it really matters or if we're looking at it from an ethnocentric point of view. Twitter may have been blocked, but China has several of its own Chinese Twitter clones . So now China can see tweets, which are predominantly not in Mandarin, in Google search results. Then again, the Los Angeles Times points out that the search results are already bringing sensitive topics into view of Chinese citizens: The tweets do not show up for all searches, but only for terms that appear to be popular on Twitter. On Thursday morning, that included discussions on such taboo subjects as how to circumvent China's Internet firewall, why Google decided to exit China and a vaccine scandal unfolding in central China. The move seems more like a principled slap in the face than anything else. But then again, so does much of this situation. Discuss

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Google Brings Twitter Search Results to China

GoDaddy Follows Google’s Lead, Abandons China

cgseo — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:35:00 +0000

Returning to a lesson we recently learned from the dancing hippie , we have to wonder if today's move by GoDaddy.com , the world's largest domain name provider, means there's more trouble in store for China and western Internet companies. According to an article in today's Washington Post, the company will follow Google's lead and cease registering websites in China. As we learned when studying the case of the dancing hippie, it's the first follower that "transforms a lone nut into a leader." Sponsor Google co-founder Sergey Brin called for the U.S. to stand up against Internet censorship in China this morning, criticizing Microsoft for its stance on the issue. While Brin's own stance has been called into question , it seems that the lone dancer has found a partner. The Post quotes Rep. Christopher Smith, the man behind "a bill that would make it a crime for U.S. companies to share personal user information with 'Internet-restricting' countries", as saying that "Google fired a shot heard 'round the world, and now a second American company has answered the call to defend the rights of the Chinese people." GoDaddy's move, however, is not the purely altruistic act of solidarity it might first appear to be. A new Chinese policy enacted last December upped the ante, requiring registrants of .cn domain names to submit photos and business identification, which would then be forwarded to the government. The law would require GoDaddy to retroactively gather information from domain registrants. While this certainly has extremely ominous implications in terms of human rights, we have to wonder how much the law implies in financial terms. GoDaddy is currently responsible for more than 40 million domain names, a number that is three times the nearest competitor. We don't know what percent of that is in China, but it could be quite the endeavor to go back and acquire extra registrant information before sending it to the government. On the other hand, we can hope that this is all being done for the good of humanity. And even if not, if it has that result in the end, does it matter what the reasons for the actions were? All skepticism aside, Google has found a friend, and the hardest part may be behind it. As Derek Sivers, the man behind the dancing hippie video , told us last time, "When you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first person to stand up and join in." GoDaddy, it seems, has stood up, joined in and now we're wondering what big player might be next. Discuss

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GoDaddy Follows Google's Lead, Abandons China

What Google Will Do in China (SXSW Presentation)

cgseo — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 22:55:55 +0000

Kaiser Kuo presented today at SXSW about Google in China. He spoke about how the Google situation will impact Chinese Internet users, other companies and the Chinese government. In the presentation, Kuo (who also spoke to ReadWriteWeb a week ago) clarified how censorship in China works. Contrary to popular belief, it is not the Great Firewall that has the most impact in China - but something China calls "self-discipline." Kuo also discussed what the next moves will be from Google, since he believes that the ball is in Google's court and Beijing won't push the situation. Sponsor History of Google in China Before getting down to the nitty gritty of the current Google-China standoff, Kaiser Kuo gave some valuable context to Google in China. In 2005 Google started to hire aggressively in China, he said. Google's decision to enter China with a censored product immediately brought grief to Google, with some pundits describing it as a "black day for Internet freedom." Google defended its actions at that point by saying that not providing search to a fifth of the world's population would be a greater loss than having censored results. At first Google had a notice on their search results stating that they were censored. Kuo also pointed out that Google only omitted results that users wouldn't have been able to view anyway had they clicked through (because the pages or sites were blocked). At that point, Google didn't host Gmail, personal search history, Blogger or other services that had personal information. Google in China also protected their employees, Kuo noted. Google never had an easy time of it in China. For example, many Chinese users couldn't spell the word "Google." Regulators made it difficult for them, as did their Chinese competitors. Google did manage to make good revenues and market share, but never "moved the needle" against its Chinese search competitor Baidu. Kuo remarked that Google was not singled out for any special treatment by the Chinese government. In 2009 Google got into trouble due to pornography in its search results, and it went dark for a short time as a result. There has been a massive growth in Internet users in China in the four years since Google entered that market. There were 2-3 million Internet users in China when Google began operations there; now there are 384 million Internet users in China. Google has around 35% market share in China, which has not been matched by any other Western company. Its annual revenues in China is around $300-400 million in revenue, which is nothing to sneeze at. In mid-December 2009 there was a hacker attack on Google, which in January Google claimed on its blog came from China. At that time Google also announced it would stop censoring search results on google.cn. Kuo doesn't believe this announcement was a cynical retreat from China due to its being defeated by Chinese competitors, which many pundits suggested at the time. Kuo said that the challenge to Google's business model is around trust, for personal data in the cloud. So Google's blog post in China was appropriate, Kuo believes. Some people have suggested that the Chinese government used the strategy known in China as "Using Quiescience to control action." The government has however unblocked Google Docs and Groups, and has not blocked any further Google services since January. Currently Google is still hiring in China and is in the midst of negotiations with the Chinese government. Kuo believes there is deliberate confusion right now."It's impossible to grasp what Google is up against without having a better grasp of how censorship in China works." The Great Firewall There are two main types of Internet censorship in China, said Kuo. The first is The Great Firewall of China, which has been nick-named "Iron Curtain 2.0." It's a system of filters at domain name or page level. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogger and other western sites have been blocked at this level. Kuo said that it's fairly simple for Chinese Internet users to "hop the firewall " using proxy services, free VPNs. So The Great Firewall is more of an inconvenience. Kuo pays for a VPN that allows him to access Western websites. Self-Discipline The second form of censorship is "more pernicious and effective," according to Kuo. It is carried out by Internet companies, on instructions from Chinese government. All Internet sites in China have to practice what is termed "self-discipline." Failing to adhere to this form of censorship means having your website or service shut down. There are some 30,000 "Internet police." Two cartoon avatars are wont to show up if a Chinese user visits pages with content offensive to the Chinese government. Most Internet users in China don't come across the Great Firewall, because most Chinese Internet users don't use Western services like Twitter and Facebook. But, Kuo said, "Google is different." It has become "a real part of the Internet culture in China." Kuo then talked about how Chinese censorship nowadays is almost all social media sites, such as social networks and microblogging sites. How Chinese Netizens Use The Internet Kuo mentioned that the Chinese Internet is more "entertainment superhighway" than "information superhighway." Online gaming is big in China. Most Chinese Internet users, Kuo said, enjoy the Internet that they have - rather than worry about the one that Western pundits think they should have. The Internet has also emerged as a de-facto public sphere in China. As long as you don't overstep certain boundaries (political activism and so forth), then the "will of the masses" is often expressed on the Internet through the likes of bulletin boards or social networks. Regularly, Chinese netizens are exposing public officials. However Kuo warns that there are "very very serious limits" to what is emerging in the public sphere. For example, anonymity leads to a lot of trolling. It's ad-hoc, reactive and informal - however it is a "squeaky wheel that is regularly getting grease." Also, a minority are pro-democracy - most of the netizens in the public sphere are pro-Chinese government. Next Moves from Beijing and Google Kuo said that the Chinese government will wait for Google to make the next move. It realises it has nothing to gain by pushing Google or being openly hostile. The ball is in Google's court and it will probably keep to its word that it will stop censorship in China. It may still shut down operations in China, which in practice means closing google.cn. But this has a lot of problematic scenarios - including the difficulty of having translations done for Google.com and staffing issues of closing down. The pros of pulling out of China include saving face and appeasing western users. But the cons are significant. They include a backlash from tech-savvy, urban Google users, a setback to scientific research, a global black eye for their image, and ceding the virtual monopoly in search in China to Baidu. The moderate scenario is that Google.cn is shut down, but continues to work with its mobile partners in China, R&D and sales continue to operate in China, and Google services will be unblocked. The best case scenario, Kuo believes, would be if Google stopped censoring google.cn - but the service stays online. Discuss

‘Enemies of the Internet’: Not Just For Dictators Anymore

cgseo — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 03:00:00 +0000

Reporters Without Borders released its annual report [ PDF ] on online access today. They call it Enemies of the Internet, and it shows a world where online censorship, intimidation and worse is increasing. It's not surprising that as access to the Internet expands, more and more dictators and tyrants will try to suppress it. But what's troubling about this year's report is the inclusion of two democratic countries: Australia and South Korea. Sponsor Both countries were included in the report's Under Surveillance list - a sub group of the main Enemies list. Australia's proposed online filtering system is something RWB says it has "never before seen in a democracy." Additionally, in the state of South Australia it's now against the law to be anonymous online if it's in the context of an election. In South Korea, a new censorship law allows for five-year prison sentences for anyone found using the Internet "to disseminate false news intended to damage the public interest." The same law requires online visitors to register their real name and national ID card number when visiting sites with more than 100,000 members. Here are a handful of the worst violators of online freedom of expression on the Enemies of the Internet list: Burma Two high-ranking government officials have been sentenced to death for having e-mailed documents abroad. Net censorship is a serious matter in Burma. Massive filtering of websites and extensive slowdowns during times of unrest are daily occurrences for the country's Internet users. The legislation governing Internet use - the Electronic Act - is one of the most liberticidal laws in the world. China As its polemic with Google and the United States on the Internet's future unfolds, China continues to intensify Web censorship, faced with an increasingly forceful online community.The much-vaunted promises made by organizers at the open ceremonies of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games have proven to be mere illusions for the world's biggest netizen prison. Expanded dissemination of propaganda, generalized surveillance and crackdowns on Charter 08 signatories are commonplace on what has become the Chinese Intranet - with significant consequences for trade. Egypt More than a mere virtual communications tool, the Egyptian Internet has become a mobilization and dissension platform. Although website blocking remains limited, authorities are striving to regain control over bloggers who are more and more organized, despite all the harassment and arrests. Iran Iran, one of cyber-censorship's record-holding countries, has stepped up its crackdown and online surveillance since the protests over the disputed presidential reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on June 12, 2009. The regime is demonizing the new media, which it is accusing of serving foreign interest.While a dozen netizens are serving out their terms in Evin Prison, bold Internet users are continuing to mobilize. Saudi Arabia An emerging bloggers' community is up against harsh censorship. These bloggers are confronting the traditional forces of Saudi society, which are attempting to prevent the Internet from becoming a forum for free discussions. Saudi Arabia is one of the first countries to have been authorized to write Internet domain names in Arabic.The Internet penetration rate, currently estimated at about 38% of the population, is rising. How- ever, it is still one of the most repressive countries with regard to the Internet. Syria Syria is reinforcing its censorship of troublesome topics on the Web and tracking netizens who dare to express themselves freely on it. As a result, social networks have been particularly targeted by omnipresent surveillance. The promised technological improvements are slow to materialize. The authorities' distrust of the potential for dissident online mobilization may be playing a role in this delay. Vietnam The progress made by Vietnam in the domain of human rights, which allowed the country to become a member of the World Trade Organization in 2007, is nothing but a distant memory. As the 2011 Communist Party Congress draws nearer, the regime is muffling dissident views on the Internet, and its first target is critics of the country's policy toward China. Discuss

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'Enemies of the Internet': Not Just For Dictators Anymore