In a purported effort to cut down on "ID sharing" in Beijing's Internet cafes, the government will require that by the end of 2008, first-time visitors will have their picture taken and ID scanned before being allowed online, according to The Beijing News and the China Media Project.
Users were already required to show identification when they entered, a rule that has been spottily enforced at times but more strictly, by most accounts, since preparations for the Olympics began. David Bandurski at China Media Project writes:
The newspaper quoted Li Fei (李菲), a spokesperson for the Beijing Cultural Law Enforcement Agency, as saying the policy was aimed at preventing "ID sharing" (一证多用). The monitoring platform will allow enforcement officials to target any terminal at any Internet bar in the city to compare the user with registered information.
Perhaps this is indeed aimed at "ID sharing," but another piece that Bandurski quotes, an editorial in the China Youth Daily, sees the new policy as creating the potential for invasion of privacy.
In this monitoring system that renders users "naked," how will the freedom and privacy of citizens using the Internet be protected? The Beijing Cultural Law Enforcement Agency reassures us that these controls end with the enforcement team's monitoring platform and that we "have no need to be concerned about the leaking of personal information."
But aside from worrying that personal information might be leaked to others, we also worry that the freedom of our online communication and the privacy of our conversations will be betrayed by public power.
Under this platform of "monitoring of any terminal at any Internet bar in the city," won't monitoring mean that enforcement officials will have the right or the opportunity to view our chat histories? Can they not read our private correspondence at will? Won't any and all online behavior fall under the eyes of the enforcement officials?
If this is the case, then all Web users really are "entirely naked," if only before a limited number of enforcement personnel.
Read a fuller quote from the editorial in Bandurski's post.
China Mobile has opened a wireless service center and Internet cafe at an altitude of 17,000 feet at the Everest base camp, making it the world's highest such site, according to People's Daily Online.
According to reports, the Internet cafe is aiming to effectively protect the Olympic torch relay teams' communications needs at Mount Qomolangma in Tibet. China Mobile has built a business office and Internet cafe at an altitude of 5,200 meters at Mount Qomolangma base camp to provide mobile services and Internet services to government officials, mountain climbing members and journalists.
Maybe they'll add an oxygen bar for out-of-shape journalists with underdeveloped hemoglobin.
This year's big international web conference is in Beijing next month, and hundreds of innovators from around the world will see the Chinese internet first hand.
The 17th Annual International World Wide Web Conference, held by a nonprofit that puts together these confabs somewhere on Earth every year, has given the conference the theme of "One World, One Web"--playing on the Olympic slogan "One World, One Dream."
Though the majority of the program is, as usual, devoted to innovations in the world wide web, several speeches and panels will take up the Chinese internet. The program doesn't have many details on the China track yet, but if it's as in-depth as the other tracks appear to be, this could be a very interesting conference.
The existing bandwidth between Asia and North America is crowded. Following FCC approval of a U.S.-China link last month, Google and five other companies have announced a Japan-U.S. link to be completed in early 2010.
The $300 million fiber-optic cable will stretch approximately 10,000 km (6,214 miles) under the Pacific. "Google's partners in the consortium, dubbed Unity, comprises Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI, Pacnet, and Singapore Telecommunications," Yahoo News reported.
Internet users in East Asia are familiar with sometimes sluggish speeds on transpacific transmissions. In my experience, connections are for some reason faster in Beijing than in Shanghai, but everywhere I've gone in China there's been some lag. (Speeds in Tokyo were very fast when I was there in late 2004 and 2005.)
The previously announced cable, dubbed the Trans-Pacific Express, is scheduled to be partially operational before the Beijing Olympics begin on August 8. It will be the first direct connection between the United States and China.
[h/t: Kaiser]
Several news stories have noted that China's Internet user base increased by more than 70 million in 2007 to a count of 213 million at year's end. Little noted is that 23 percent of these users access the Internet from mobile devices, the remainder counted as broadband users.
The statistics, released by the China Internet Network Information Center and reported by ChinaTechNews, do not seem to specify how many of these mobile users also use broadband, and I can't find data on whether people use broadband at home or at work.
CINIC also reported (translated) that almost 40 percent of users said the top reason they used the Internet is for instant messaging, edging out e-mail as the top application.
As it stands, there's almost twice as much bandwidth across the Atlantic as there is across the Pacific. But with new U.S. FCC approval for the first ever China-U.S. fiber link, this is all about to change.
The score right now: 5,547 to 2,726. That's the current Atlantic vs. Pacific bandwidth score in gigabits per second, according to TeleGeography. The Trans-Pacific Express "will initially provide capacity of up to 1.28 terabits per second, and the system will have a design capacity of up to 5.12Tbps to support future Internet growth and advanced applications such as video and e-commerce," writes ChinaTechNews.
Construction has been under way since September, and should be complete before the Olympics. Internet speeds in Beijing are generally pretty good in my experience, but further south in Shanghai, much of the transpacific traffic is terribly sluggish on a variety of connections. Perhaps this is a matter of higher demand there, but with the FCC's approval for the cable to land in Oregon, things should get better soon.
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