Some thoughts on how news that the Chinese government is allowing some browsers to access Western social media is emblematic of the evolution of internet censorship in China and its increasing intrusiveness, not a backtrack.
In the very beginning internet censorship was "easy" in the sense that all communications were entirely visible to anyone along the transmission routes. If you owned the network, you controlled what went through it.
Early iterations of the great firewall depended heavily on searching for keywords that it didn't like and disrupting responses when it saw them. "Falun gong", "Tiananmen square massacre", etc on your web page? Yeah that's right out.
That is still around today (especially in checking domain names like the example here), but at a much smaller extent because people figured out pretty quickly that they could encrypt and hide the content of webpages and communication
This was the rise of VPNs as the easy trick to get around the Great Firewall. They present two large problems for censors.
1. No way to differentiate "good" firewall hopping (like scientists using Google Scholar) from "bad" firewall hopping.
2. Expensive and difficult to detect
1. No way to differentiate "good" firewall hopping (like scientists using Google Scholar) from "bad" firewall hopping.
2. Expensive and difficult to detect
The first step in addressing these was delegating internal censorship to domestic tech companies. You cannot hide your messages from the website you are talking to, and it allowed the government to focus resources almost entirely on international traffic link.springer.com/chapter/10.100…
Even then the companies need to focus their time on sensitive subjects though based on keywords, which demonstrates what a huge problem not being able to tell what's in a message is for censors
But recently there's been a new problem for them called HTTPS which makes it so just about every single website is encrypted 100% of the time. You can't ban individual wikipedia articles anymore, you have to ban everything or nothing.
This means that websites China cannot afford to block such as github, which the Chinese tech industry insists it *needs* in order to remain competitive, become a source of uncensorable free speech npr.org/2019/04/10/709…
These new browsers are the solution to that problem. Putting censorship in your browser goes all the way back to the beginning, where anything and everything you do online is visible to the government and directly traceable to you.
With a browser like that the government can simply remove tweets, google search results, or youtube videos from the webpage and you would be none the wiser, and while they're at it they may also be general purpose spyware to see your offline activities too washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pac…
And as a final added bonus, it forces internet users to pay the computational cost of their own censorship and surveillance. That they can access twitter is a sweetener to get them to hop on board. I'm almost surprised it took this long.
