My first thought was unfortunately whether the UK and other Western nations would copy this to build their own Firewalls. To be honest i still don't think it's a goal anyone is actively working towards and that's a bit of an hyperbolic take. But the truth is that we are moving more towards such a system then we are moving away.

My second thought is how badly Chinese communism must be doing that they need such a massive effort in order to prevent their citizens from accessing information and voicing dissent. We are lucky to be living in such a free society. Internet seems to be losing the battle against government interference and censorship and that is more of a bad thing then a good thing.

As I understand it the idea is not necessarily to stop all dissent / awareness, but that it's useful to be able to slow the spread of "rumours" / incendiary information when it is spreading virally. This gives authorities time to come up with a response if required.

While I personally wouldn't want to live in a country which does this, the flip side of unrestricted virality in countries that culturally might not be prepared for it are events like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_WhatsApp_lynchings

Given that the US controls much of what happens on the Internet, another issue for many countries (not China so much) is that without controls they become extremely vulnerable to US influence campaigns and "colour revolutions".

I predict that all countries will end up with something like the GFW eventually because there's basically no other way for governments to achieve "Internet sovereignty" (enforce laws regarding users and publishers on the web). The US might be last to do this because it is in the doubly privileged position of a) being able to exert significant pressure on other countries and b) being able to apply regulation to major US-based Internet companies using their own legal system.

The original GFW was literally built by Cisco. The west already has the technology. They only need an excuse to deploy it.

China relies heavily on export, so they can't just block everything. There are tons of proxy services to bypass GFW in China, and most of them have government background.

I listened to a British politics podcast the other day called Not Another One and they were discussing that among western governments there is some looking at the UK’s porn block because in general politicians think that things have gone too far in children being able to access to extreme content, and that if 20 years ago it had been suggested this had been where we’d be, it wouldn’t have been seen as acceptable. They used the example that if you want to publish a very explicit book in the U.K., the Obscene Publications Acts would put limits on you doing so, but putting it online would be allowed

> My second thought is how badly Chinese communism must be doing that they need such a massive effort in order to prevent their citizens from accessing information and voicing dissent.

Well, OpenAI and other companies training AI models have shown that the architecture of the model matters less than the quality of data fed into it. Same applies for humans.

I understand that the Great Firewall is mostly about censoring dissent, but it's also to keep Chinese citizens away from junk food media sources. The type of videos you see on Douyin vs Tiktok is a great example of the difference.

Yes, the videos on Douyin are politically censored, but they're also a lot less brainrot than Tiktok videos. The Tiktok algo is optimized for ad impressions and profit, whereas the Douyin algo is more tuned to some nebulous concept of Confucian social harmony, for better or worse.

A more nuanced take is that I don't think it's useful to measure Chinese govt behavior just mapped to "amount of suppressing political dissent". I actually think the level of censorship is above the level required for that. It's more useful to recognize that "suppressing political dissent" is actually a subset of Confucian "promote social harmony"- which is not strongly valued in the USA but is at least important enough to be paid lip service in China- and I suspect a big chunk of educated members of government may truly believe in that ideal. It explains behaviors like "why the Douyin algo is so different from Tiktok" and other overreaches of the Chinese govt, because it's not solely about suppressing dissent.

would copy this to build their own Firewalls.

Just about every company already uses some form of this on their network, especially those in highly regulated sectors like banking and other finance-related industries.

More usefully and perhaps "on the other side", I have a proxy on my network to block and modify requests for ads and other content I want to "censor".

> i still don't think it's a goal anyone is actively working towards and that's a bit of an hyperbolic take

now this is what Pink Floyd meant by "comfortably numb". mass cognitive dissonance and denial

> My first thought was unfortunately whether the UK and other Western nations would copy this to build their own Firewalls

Various western networking companies already sell such products to authoritarian regimes, such as Nokia[1], Blue Coat Systems[2] and Siemens[3]. China, for reasons that are well documented elsewhere, has always wanted to build it with "their tech", the only thing that's new to me is their export of such tech to Chinese-allied nations.

> My second thought is how badly Chinese communism must be doing that they need such a massive effort in order to prevent their citizens from accessing information and voicing dissent.

This is a very controversial opinion, but the overton window has shifted in this respect and many people often like censorship/DPI when done for "altruistic reasons", and it was sad to see Europeans (presumably) asking for blocking of social media sites since Nepal[4] had done the same, disregarding the second-order effects it would have.

Of course, we live in interesting times, with a major western world power embracing economic policies that prioritize government ownership of industries[5], which is typically closer to communism than anything we've seen in the past :)

[1] https://www.wired.com/2011/08/nokia-siemens-spy-systems

[2] https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/about-bis/102-about-bis/ne...

[3] https://www.spiegel.de/international/business/ard-reports-si...

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45137363

[5] https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1748/...

I for one can only access rt.com from a European country if I use a vpn. So that is step 1. The next steps will come. Our government has shown itself willing and (partly) able to block content from its citizens, regardless of their intent. Ie being pro-Putin, or wanting to study what opinions circulate in Russia to try and maintain some level human understanding for our fellow humans on the other side.

Moreover a large part of our government is willing to implement something as egregious as ChatControl. So they are not above animing extremely invasive spying tech at their own citizens.

1+1=2. All prerequisites have been met for a European “firewall”. Hate the word btw, a firewall is supposed to be a defense tool. But these censoring tools are an attack on our agency. Every time I try to access something I am not allowed to access by my overlords I hear in my head "You are not allowed to see this information citizen."

> My second thought is how badly Chinese communism must be doing that they need such a massive effort in order to prevent their citizens from accessing information and voicing dissent.

I don't quite understand why the first impulse is that it covers up government incompetence. There are other incentives for mass social control of discourse and information.

"My second thought is how badly Chinese communism must be doing that they need such a massive effort in order to ..."

China have visa-free visit policy for many countries, you could actually go there to see how "bad" it is

https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-visa-free-travel-p...