Rebecca MacKinnon, "a recovering TV reporter-turned-blogger," has posted a long and interesting report about blogging in China, and censorship on Microsoft's popular MSN Spaces, amongst others. It says:
On New Years Eve, MSN Spaces took down the popular blog written by Zhao Jing, aka Michael Anti. Now all you get when you attempt to visit his blog at: http://spaces.msn.com/members/mranti/ is the error message pictured above. (You can see the Google cache of his blog up until Dec.22nd here.)
Note, his blog was TAKEN DOWN by MSN people. Not blocked by the Chinese government.
Anti is one of China's edgiest journalistic bloggers, often pushing at the boundaries of what is acceptable. (See a recent profile of him here, and an interview with Anti here.) His old blog at the U.S.-hosted Blog-city is believed to have caused the Chinese authorities to block all Blog-city blogs.
Numerous people are up in arms about this, of course, including Microsoft geek blogger Robert Scoble. But there are also local complications, such as the competition between Bokee -- "China's largest domestically-owned blog hosting company" -- and MSN Spaces. Here, MacKinnon quotes Roland Soong:
Bokee is going to go down in Internet history as calling in the Internet police to crack down on a blogger for exercising his constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech and the police did just that, and the motivation of Bokee was commercial in nature (that is, they want to use the government's security apparatus to damage MSN Spaces as a competitor). I know that this is one columnist's opinion, but Bokee had better make it very clear that they did not support that opinion AND also they do not support the disappearance of the Anti blog..
But whose "constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech" is that, exactly? If a Chinese blogger writes in Chinese using a Chinese service (inlcuding MSN Spaces, operating in China), then surely local laws apply. You're not going to get "freedom of speech" in the UK or the US if you want to publish racist or seditious material, child pornography and similar things, regardless of any laws that might apply in your country of residence. There's nothing new about censorship, and it certainly isn't restricted either to MSN Spaces or China.
Writing in English on a US-based service is another matter, but even then, a local administration can decide to take local action -- as the Chinese authorities seem to have done when they blocked not just Anti's blog but all Blog City blogs from China. So one man's freedom to be heard ends up depriving many other people of their freedom to be heard.... as it would if all MSN Spaces were blocked in China.
