Exporting Censorship

It seems sometimes like the Internet can do no good. If you believe the writers of the Daily Mail, a popular British conservative daily, it’s responsible for almost all the ills that are inflicted on the struggling middle classes of the UK - immigrants stealing the jobs of Oxbridge graduates, immigrants moving in next door and lowering house prices. The latest wheeze is the tale of the immigrant who moved in next door after stealing the job of an Oxbridge graduate and then set about sexually abusing and murdering young innocent children. And it’s all the Internet’s fault.

Last week David Cameron announced plans to police the Internet, after meeting with the mother of a child who was murdered by pedophile. Accordingly, there are now two types of porn on the Internet: the legal type, where the risk is that children will accidentally type in “Britney Spears donkey act” into a search engine and come up with all kinds of nastiness, and the illegal kind that involves the abuse of children. Google, which hasn’t made many friends since it provided details of how it “maximizes it’s profits”, is to blame, and Cameron has threatened legal action if it doesn't comply with the new laws, which involve Google returning no search results for pornographic material that is illegal in the UK. He stopped short of using the actual words “according to relevant laws and regulations”, but you get the general idea.

Like most politicians, Cameron appears to have selective amnesia when it comes to what laws were passed during the tenure of the opposition Labour government when toothless extreme porn laws were passed, and a number of suspect arrested under the laws were promptly acquitted when the case came to trial. It’s the The Leveson Effect, whereby laws are proposed to make things that were previously illegal even more illegal in response to something that everyone has seen on new reports.

Regardless of whether new laws are really going to help curb child murders by sex fiends remains to be seen, what has made fewer headlines is that Chinese technology firm Huawei is building the censoring engine that will protect the masses from nasty blue movies. The problem is that no-one really knows what Huawei is up to, and since they’re a state owned company, there are some suspicions that not all of it’s intentions are honorable. Indeed, they’ve already been banned from providing Internet tech in Australia, and they’ve not gone unnoticed in the UK either. An independent security review of Huawei’s activities criticized the “lack of ministerial oversight” of the company’s rapid expansion in the UK.

This has led to an odd situation whereby the UK is actively investigating a company that already has won a contract with the UK government. The good news is that while many might be bemoaning the lack of innovation and the reliance on manufacturing to bolster the economy, censorship and Internet control might be the one service industry that China can successfully export.

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