The Cambridge University Press has backed away from its initial (temporary?) plans to have a China-specific website for its prestigious China Quarterly journal that adhered to Chinese government requests as to content. Though it would have kept a copy of its materials intact for the rest of the world (presumably until some other country asked for a country-specific website), the Chinese-focused version would have left out some 300 articles related to “the crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, policies toward Tibetan and Uighur ethnic minorities, Taiwan and the 1966 – 76 Cultural Revolution”.
As China becomes a larger and larger market, the question of how to engaged with its stringent rules as what materials and products may or may not be shared becomes more and more significant. While Cambridge University Press faced serious academic backlash about this, other countries have made similar noises about materials that should be taken down for a variety of reasons, from cultural distaste to intellectual property considerations to political dislike to privacy expectations. Some of them have insisted only on a “local” version for their people; others have demanded the Internet as a whole reflect their standards.
It is unclear where this will end, even as the world’s intellectual and economic power shifts and grows. I’d like to think that maximal freedom of information would apply, but I’m sure that even I have things that I would disagree with full global publication of.
In reversal, Cambridge University Press restores articles after China censorship row
The Cambridge University Press faced academic outrage after agreeing to remove articles about Tibet, Tiananmen Square and China’s Cultural Revolution.
I think I'm more worried about Europe than about China in this regard, although the United States could be worrisome also.
And you do have an applicable point in noting that even you (and I) do not believe in TOTAL freedom. One person gets outraged about child porn, another about materials harmful to the state.
I wonder if some future services will try to avoid these issues altogether by operating in China only, or in the EU only, or in the US only? We already see music and other IP services that do something like this, just because of the nation-by-nation differences in laws.
+John E. Bredehoft And, ultimately, that becomes a weird services-vs-data split, as well as further fragmenting the world (or, perhaps, going back to the type of fragmentation that prevailed until the mid-90s).
China's model is more stringent (by locking itself away, requiring compliance just within its intellectual market, and being more than happy and able to replicate any services internally that it wants), but the EU's is more sweeping (change everything, everywhere, to our liking).