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T A B L E_T A L K

Microsoft vs. the feds -- who'll come out on top in this clash of the titans? Place your bets in Table Talk's Digital Culture area

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R E C E N T L Y

Parental advisory warning
By Cynthia Joyce
Do's and don'ts of getting mom and dad online
(01/13/98)

Air Microsoft
Satire by D.T. Max.
The sky's the limit for Bill on a buying spree.
(01/12/98)

The 21st Challenge
By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau
Caller IQ and other premium phone services. With results of Challenge No. 2
(01/09/98)

Live! From my bedroom
By Simon Firth
"Homecam" operators broadcast their daily lives to Web voyeurs
(01/08/98)

Apple's profit and gloss
By Scott Rosenberg
Steve Jobs offers a Macworld progress report -- with some glaring omissions
(01/07/98)

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BROWSE THE
21ST ARCHIVES

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BY ANDREW LEONARD | On Dec. 15, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post reported that China's rulers were scaling back efforts to control local access to the Internet. Despite years of hard-line rhetoric and threats to block access to politically (and pornographically) controversial Web sites, as well as monitor personal e-mail and bulletin board communication, the commissars, said the Post, were finally facing up to Net reality: Controlling the Internet is a fool's errand -- it's too costly, too time-consuming and just too damn hard.

Techno-libertarians everywhere no doubt rejoiced at the news from Hong Kong. The conceit that the Internet will demolish bureaucracies of all kinds -- from the IRS to the worst despotic dictatorship -- is, after all, a digital revolutionary's most cherished fantasy. According to Hong Kong's premier English-language newspaper, the mighty People's Republic of China had been caught in the act -- kow-towing to the inexorable power of the Net.

Or had it? Just two weeks later, a different meme swept through the world's media. On Dec. 30, China's Ministry of Public Security released "sweeping new controls" criminalizing a wide array of Internet uses -- everything from "making falsehoods or distorting the truth" to "promoting feudal superstitions," "leaking state secrets" and "injuring the reputation of state organs." Far from acknowledging defeat in the face of the all-conquering Net, these regulations, the most detailed yet announced in China, appeared to signal a renewed determination to combat digital pollution.

Less than a week after the release of the new regulations, local authorities at a major Chinese university shut down an Internet bulletin board, to the outrage of many students. Evidently, in the ongoing showdown of China vs. the Net, it's a bit too soon to declare a winner. But the fight promises to be well worth watching. The Internet is no longer an exotic oddity in China; it's a major focus for commerce as well as a flash point for intellectual debate. And, as is the case everywhere, it is growing fast.

The most obvious place to grade Internet progress in China is with regard to the basic quality of Internet connectivity itself. Long gone are the days just three or four years ago when the vast majority of China's Internet bandwidth was funneled through a relatively tiny connection at Beijing's Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP). In those days, it was considered extremely bad form even to send casual e-mail to the few thousands of Chinese who had Internet accounts. The problem wasn't political but financial: Recipients of e-mail often had to pay disproportionately huge sums for each arriving message.

Today, depending on whose estimate one believes, anywhere from 200,000 to 600,000 Chinese enjoy some form of Internet access. Cybercafes have sprouted up in Shanghai and Beijing, and at least four major gateways now connect China's main internal networks to the outside world. In November, AT&T announced plans to install a whopping 45-megabit-per second T-3 connection in Shanghai, a feat one reporter estimated would increase China's overall Internet bandwidth 20-fold.

And AT&T isn't the only foreign corporation rushing to build the Internet in China. Nearly every major Internet infrastructure company has a significant presence in the People's Republic. Sun Microsystems and Bay Networks are busy constructing a high profile national intranet -- the so-called China Wide Web. Cisco, Netscape, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and even Yahoo are all busy with plans for Middle Kingdom expansion.

All that infrastructure building has an undeniable momentum. The bigger the network, the harder it is to clamp down upon. As Xu Rongsheng, deputy director of IHEP, says, "There is almost no way to control it anymore. If people want to find a bad address, they will."

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N E X T_P A G E | "I never have trouble"