In a speech at Stanford yesterday, Bill Gates waxed eloquent about the openness of the Internet. In a burst of techno-utopianism, Gates at one point told the crowd, "I don't see any risk in the world at large that someone will restrict free content flow on the Internet. You cannot control the Internet." This seemed rather a curious thing for the Microsoft chief to say, considering that his company (along with Google, Yahoo, and others) has cooperated with China's censorship efforts. The entire Chinese Internet experience, in fact, raises questions about whether Gates' beautiful vision is true to the facts as we know them. Certainly the country is doing a pretty decent job of "controlling the Internet."

IDG News, which reported on Gates' speech, also noted that he tied the openness of the 'Net to economic development. "If your country wants to have a developed economy... you basically have to open up the Internet," said Gates.

It's a self-serving argument, though this doesn't mean that Gates isn't sincere about it. The idea that countries like China will be forced to open its censorship regime as the people get richer and as more Western companies invest in the region is routinely trotted out by execs at Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google as a reason for their current compliance with the censorship regime. Sure, they'd rather not censor, but they're willing to do so in the short term because the censorship will soon be lifted—and the companies' involvement in China will be one of the reasons why things loosen up.

Hopefully it's true, but the story of China's rise to date has been one of economic liberalization coupled with the maintenance of an authoritarian political structure. With China being vast enough to support a massive internal ecosystem of Internet companies and services, there's certainly no guarantee that ordinary Chinese citizens will ever feel the need to evade the country's Great Firewall. And why bother? It's not difficult to do, but it carries severe risks.

Censorship as nuisance

The Atlantic's James Fallows (who now lives in China) has a fascinating piece in this month's issue about the Chinese system of control and why it turns out to be surprisingly effective at getting people to self-censor. The Chinese system relies on DNS blocking, URL keyword blocking, and page content blocking, but it's not hard to bypass; an ordinary VPN of the kind used by every American firm in the country will evade the authorities.

But that's not the point. As Fallows puts it:

What the government cares about is making the quest for information just enough of a nuisance that people generally won't bother. Most Chinese people, like most Americans, are interested mainly in their own country. All around them is more information about China and things Chinese than they could possibly take in. The newsstands are bulging with papers and countless glossy magazines. The bookstores are big, well stocked, and full of patrons, and so are the public libraries. Video stores, with pirated versions of anything. Lots of TV channels. And of course the Internet, where sites in Chinese and about China constantly proliferate. When this much is available inside the Great Firewall, why go to the expense and bother, or incur the possible risk, of trying to look outside?

It's a point that was raised by Amnesty International in a 2006 report on the subject. Amnesty took issue with the idea that simply engaging with China will (necessarily) nudge the country toward openness and democracy. The group points out that this has certainly not been the case with the Internet, which has exponentially greater levels of censorship and control than it did a decade ago when few foreign computer companies operated in the country.

Since China's constitution (see article 35) explicitly provides for freedom of speech, freedom to protest, and freedom of the press, Amnesty called on companies operating in the country to take a stand against censorship based on China's own legal system. If such a stand is taking place to any significant degree, it has passed largely without comment.

Some commentators expect that physically opening itself to an influx of worldwide visitors to the Beijing Olympics will force China to loosen up its controls on the Internet. But as Fallows points out, China is already prepping a plan to unblock large swaths of IP addresses likely to be used by foreigners during the games. Most visitors to China won't even notice the censorship, though this doesn't mean that the situation is improving for the Chinese student who would like to use a WordPress installation to talk about a riot he just witnessed in the countryside.

Changing the system will take serious work, as Amnesty found out at the Internet Governance Forum in 2006. When it attempted to call China out for its censorship, a Chinese diplomat to the UN stood up and announced, "In China, we don't have software blocking Internet sites. Sometimes we have trouble accessing them. But that's a different problem... We do not have restrictions at all." The remark drew a jeering "Come on!" from someone in the audience, but it did indicate just how much work remains to be done even to get China to admit what it's doing to the 'Net. Actually changing that behavior will prove even more difficult, especially in a country where promoting "social cohesion" routinely trumps freedom of speech.

While Gates may turn out to be right in the long run, his predictions could take decades to come true.