Ancestors

Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2025-01-18 at 18:00

To be slightly blunter than The Atlantic allowed me to be: the tiktok ban is a protectionist subsidy to Meta and Google worth hundreds of billions of dollars: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/internet-censorship-tiktok-ban/681361/

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Toot

Written by Mark Wollschlager on 2025-01-18 at 22:49

@ethanz American technology was the basis for the "The Great Firewall" and the panopticon that is the internal internet in china. The beta testing was done in development there and they took the ball and ran with it. The same thing will happen here, just more of the 'frog in a pot of warming water' sort of way. "We need to be protected" is just the first couple of clicks of the stove dial.

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Descendants

Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2025-01-20 at 12:22

@markwoll Mark, do you have a reference for that? I studied internet censorship for many years and while functionality of Chinese and US routers were similar - you can argue that China was copying features of US tech - the tech used to create GFW was Chinese, as far as I know.

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Written by Mark Wollschlager on 2025-01-20 at 18:43

@ethanz A bit of hyperbole on my part, but it is well documented that Cisco and Juniper ( and Nortel ) were providing hardware and project support during the beginning of the GFW. Just hardware!! But with the knowledge of what it was to be used for.

I appreciate the distinction, but the bottom line is that the US and other 'western' corporations are the primary developers of surveillance tech. Developed and sold to governments with a strong profit motivation.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/ciscos-latest-attempt-dodge-responsibility-facilitating-human-rights-abuses-export

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Written by Ethan Zuckerman on 2025-01-20 at 21:04

@markwoll 2016 is a pretty late reference - I'm talking in the piece about 2000-2010. But yes, the capabilities were in most hardware, and in that era, the best hardware was US made. There's a big distinction between being able to filter packets and using that capability to surpress political speech. And China was certainly developing their own hard and software dedicated towards different forms of suppression at that point.

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