It’s not easy being the father of the Chinese Internet. Children are running  by, boats are paddling, the smell of roast lamb fills the air, and Michael  Robinson, a young American computer engineer, sits rigidly, facing an empty cafe  on the shore of Qinghai Lake, speaking in a low voice of the crackdown. “What is  better? Big brother Internet? Or no Internet at all?” Michael asks.
Michael was hired in 1996 by the Chinese government and Global One (a  Sprint-France Telecom-Deutsche Telekom joint venture) to build the first network  in China providing public access to the Internet. One day sticks in his mind.  The Chinese engineers working with him suddenly convened a special meeting,  demanding to know if it would be possible to do keyword searching inside e-mails  and web addresses on the Chinese Internet. Not really, Michael replied; all  information that travels the Net is broken up into little packets. It’s hard to  “sniff” packets of information, particularly coded packets. You would need to  intercept packets as they travel, and then there’s the problem of collating the  information they contain, actually making sense of it. Yes, yes, they said, but  can you do it? On the third go-round, it dawned on Michael that his fellow  computer geeks wanted to end the meeting, too. But at a higher level, someone  required assurance. Before Internet construction proceeded further, they would  need to monitor what Chinese users did with it. For the engineers, this was just  cover-your-ass stuff. As long as the foreigner assured them that down the road  the Chinese would be able to build an Internet firewall against the world and  conduct surveillance on its own citizens, the engineers could continue working  with him. Yes, yes, it can be done, Michael told them, and they went back to  work. 继续阅读“Ethan Gutmann: Who Lost China’s Internet?”