Hello out there... Following up on China

[Fraering Philip G <pgf9240@usl.edu>]

(I tried subscribing a while back... I never got the flood of
cypherpunk mail messages, so I guess it didn't work. Well, netscape
is working tolerably well for reading the archives, and I wanted to
comment on the following:

Begin excerpt from alex@proust.suba.com:

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I've seen a couple of pointers to information about China's ambitious
attempt to build their own censorable net, but not a lot of discussion.
The Chineese net strikes me as a very signifiant (and very negative)
development.

In a worst case scenario, I could see them shopping their net around the
world as an alternative to the Internet. China's size might make it
possible for them to put together something that might be in the
Internet's ballpark as an information resource, especially for technical
and commercial applications. This would make it attractive to other
countries -- Islamic, for example -- who want to use networking to stay
competitive economically with the West, but who are unwilling to allow
information to flow freely.

<<End of excerpt.

I'm suprised noone else has commented on this.

For starters, there's a very real risk to anyone buying into
InterHan that they're not going to get a "culturally neutral
anti-open-Western-society controlled-by-the-dictators" version
of the internet all set to construct the Chinese/Arab version
of Linux.

They're going to be getting a heavy-handed propaganda tool for
the use of the current People's Republic's elite.

I doubt there's going to be much appeal elsewhere.

Phil