Will Green Dam backfire?

It’s my lucky day – two columns in 24 hours! Newsweek has just published my column on Green Dam (even though it was written before the Chinese government agreed to relax the rules). I tried to argue that the introduction of Green Dam is actually going to be counterproductive if greater control is what the ...

It's my lucky day - two columns in 24 hours! Newsweek has just published my column on Green Dam (even though it was written before the Chinese government agreed to relax the rules). I tried to argue that the introduction of Green Dam is actually going to be counterproductive if greater control is what the Chinese authorities are after. Well, judge for yourself.

It’s my lucky day – two columns in 24 hours! Newsweek has just published my column on Green Dam (even though it was written before the Chinese government agreed to relax the rules). I tried to argue that the introduction of Green Dam is actually going to be counterproductive if greater control is what the Chinese authorities are after. Well, judge for yourself.

Beijing might have had a better chance to get China’s PC-using masses to acquiesce to a well-designed program that was selective about blocking pornographic content. But because Green Dam blocks legitimate content and increases vulnerability to hacking, it may provoke a backlash. Since Green Dam currently works with only one operating system, Windows, it may push some users to experiment with Linux. Others might learn the advanced tricks of Windows or experiment with advanced anticensorship and privacy tools, which may not have been a high priority before the imposition of Green Dam.

Taking on pornography may also be more difficult than Beijing thinks. By most accounts, it is the Internet’s biggest killer app. Blocking it would run afoul of the "cute-cat theory of digital activism," which holds that it’s always best to post illicit content on extremely popular Web sites. (Shutting down YouTube, for instance, may thwart a handful of dissidents, but it would upset many millions of cat lovers.) The popularity of online pornography, of course, outshines even that of pets. "There are probably more people in China who want to look at porn than want to look at Western human-rights sites or Falun Gong sites," says Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media. There may be no more effective way of promoting awareness of anticensorship tools than putting a bug-ridden program between pornography and a generation of teens.

Evgeny Morozov is a fellow at the Open Society Institute and sits on the board of OSI's Information Program. He writes the Net Effect blog on ForeignPolicy.com

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