Friday, March 21, 2008

China Content Filtering

One of the things I found annoying when I was in Beijing at the end of last year was that I was unable to blog because Blogger, Livejournal, wordpress, and most any large blogging sites were blocked by the government's filters. This is not new to me since it's pretty much a widely known fact but it's one of those "I knew that" type things that didn't really sink in on me until I actually experienced the block first hand.



This experience made me think of a crazy idea. I started by thinking that if I ever moved to China, I would make sure I had a VPN server hosted in the US so that I can route all my traffic through the US to by-pass the filters (I am sure other techies have thought of this before and probably already do it). Then I thought hey, there are probably quite a bit of US/UK/CA entrepreneurs and English teachers that would enjoy the same technology. What if I made a business out of this by providing a service available to foreigners visiting or living in China? That way, the online freedom we have always enjoyed can travel with us regardless of what country we visit. Of course, that's given that the Chinese government only cares about filtering the content that the Chinese nationals see and hear but not foreigners as well. However, even with that aside, it may still be an unrealistic idea after all. This is because I am concerned about two factors:

1. Political implications
2. Demand for this type of service to make it a viable business

As you can probably tell, this is probably something I won't pursue myself but if anyone is gutsy enough, has a good business model, and has enough connections with the Chinese government to get their support for it based on economic growth implications, I would love to see it happen!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

My primary concern would be that it's easy for China to block your service. Would this be an install? a blog plug-in? or what?

Would be cool to see something like this though likely difficult to monetize...

Jeremy Cheng - "An opinionated young professional" said...

I completely agree... I am not so sure the monetization of this service will be an easy thing nor if it's possible at all. I wonder how many of the target audience would be willing to pay for a monthly fee?

In terms of technology, since the purpose of this VPN technology is not for security, I would say PPTP which is something built in to Windows would do the trick. This means, users would just pay for the account and login with a built-in function in Windows and Macs. It can also work for Linux which just takes a little bit of effortless hacking.

With that said, there needs to be some sort of clever "anti-leaking of usernames and passwords" mechanism to be in place which I haven't thought much about yet.