A short, but sadly accurate given how things are going, opinion piece on the future of the internet.
http://news.sky.com/story/sky-views-uk-now-closer-to-chinese-web-model-11085861
China pioneered a very different conception of the internet. The Communist Party managed to exclude the Silicon Valley giants that have carved up the rest of the digital world. Instead, homegrown services like WeChat, which has one billion users, dominate. The government has access to all those users' data. If you type a banned word or phrase in a group message, it simply won't appear on the other person's phone. Censored terms include 'Tiananmen Incident' and even 'Winnie the Pooh', after internet users spotted a physical resemblance between President Xi and the bear of very little brain.
According to Huang Yuan, writing in the London Review of Books: "When the internet first appeared, many people, including some Chinese, were optimistic about horizontality, elective mass communication, free flows of information and the empowerment of the individual voice, but it has since become clear that the internet has very little to do with freedom and much more to do with control."
In the UK, the government constantly puts pressure on technology companies to "do more" - to prevent radicalisation, to detect and censor inappropriate posts from their users, to keep children safe online - the traditional functions of democratically-elected government. But the British state is also taking back control: the Digital Economy Act, passed in April this year, bans citizens' access to perfectly legal websites that don't meet its requirements.
For a long time, the Chinese approach to the internet appeared to be a relic of a repressive past. These days, depressingly, it looks like the future.
http://news.sky.com/story/sky-views-uk-now-closer-to-chinese-web-model-11085861