Why the Chinese internet surveillance is really nothing to joke about

I have been joking here about Randy's experiences with access to telecom while he is living in China. CNN sometimes gets pre-empted without warning and replaced with the Daily Show. Just last week he could not sign into Skype at all for a day or two and when he contacted Skype help desk, the guy on the other end told him, without any alarm, that the Chinese government was doing a test to see if they could interfere with Skype and since it was working, Randy should expect to have no further problem in a day or so. Randy has been tooling around different news websites to see how fast they load. Sometimes CNN.com and BBC.com take a very long time. AlJazeera loads immediately. Of course, blogs not at all. I even sent him links to various blogs that use different formats to see if ANY of them got through. None.
This article that was in the Christian Science Monitor warns of the potential dangers to us all of the Chinese government's internet policies. Basically, the Chinese market for surveillance and filtering software is huge, and since the Chinese government is footing the bill, a lot of companies that are developing the tools to further the Chinese control over internet access. These same companies then have a fully functioning product that they can (and you know will) market. It is a product that will create markets.

SHANGHAI, CHINA As China began to go online, observers made brash predictions that the Internet would pry the country open. Cyberspace, the thinking went, would prove too vast and wild for Beijing to keep under its thumb.
Now these early assumptions are being sharply revised. Under an authoritarian government determined to control information, China has grown a new version of the Internet. As former US President Bill Clinton noted recently, China's Internet
is very unlike the cauldron of dissenting voices that is the hallmark of the Internet familiar to Americans. Instead, it's heavily filtered, monitored, censored, and most of all, focused on making money.
The success of Beijing's strategy - to harness the network's business potential while minimizing it as a conduit for free speech - has some concerned that it has established a medium and new censoring tools that other countries can adopt.
"The biggest danger is that China creates a very large market and testing ground for surveillance and filtering software," says Danny O'Brien with the Electronic Frontier
Foundation in San Francisco.
As Chinese Web companies seek to enlarge their markets particularly in developing countries, the question looms about whether they will export their values as well. Chinese tech firms have an eye on emerging markets in Africa, South America, and India. These firms are probably peddling censorship tools, says the free-speech advocacy group Reporters Without Borders.
The Paris-based organization releases a new report Thursday filled with tips for bloggers and others to avoid censorship and monitoring. The report available on the group's website, which is blocked here, crowns China the "world champion" of Internet censorship.

And of course, it wouldn't just be "emerging markets" that would "benefit" from the new technologies. What would stopexistingg markets from buying into this, too?
But the Chinese censorship issue still looms large in my own life. Just simple, domestic communication between me and Randy has been affected, but fortunately, there has not been an emergency. He can be reached by phone with either his US cell which works there (at $2.30/minute) or his Chinese cell, or his office---butoccasionallyy these are interrupted, too, without warning or obvious reason (like when Hurricane Katrina knocked out power to almost the entire state of Mississippi and I couldn't receive calls in to my cell phone for a week--that I could understand). I worry so often about our own personal Chinese situation; it is one of those few adventures I look forward to being done.