Future Now calls attention to a brief report in the January/February issue of Foreign Policy:

China censors the Internet effectively, and it appears to be exporting that expertise to other dictatorships. Beijing recently sent engineers trained in phone tapping to Zimbabwe. It also arranged to send computer equipment designed for filtering—or spying—on the Internet. In 2004, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s state-owned telecom, TelOne, made Internet service providers sign contracts allowing it to monitor and censor illegal material. The Chinese hardware could make this job much easier.

Future Now observes, “If you’re a dictator or president for life, why choose the completely open, dangerously destabilizing Western version of the Internet, when you could go with an Internet that lets you control the content your citizens see and observe what they do?”

Given current trends, I’m not so sure those of us in what used to be known as “the free world” will continue to enjoy the open and destabilizing version of the Internet either.

Just saw this post on Michael Geist’s blog:

Starting tomorrow, China’s Ministry of Information Industry plans to begin offering four country-code domains. In addition to the dot-cn country code domain, three new Chinese character domains are on the way: dot-China, dot-net, and dot-com. As the People’s Daily Online notes this “means Internet users don’t have to surf the Web via the servers under the management of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) of the United States.” In other words, the Chinese Internet becomes a reality tomorrow. With it, the rules of the game may change as 110 million Internet users will suddenly have access to a competing dot-com (albeit in a different character set) and will no longer rely exclusively on ICANN for the resolution of Internet domain name queries.

Geist also has some good context and analysis of what this means. (Andy Oram also wrote a good backgrounder on the issues last October.) It will be interesting to see how things develop.