The Cost of Censorship

China has always been good at censorship.  It is almost impossible to censor everything on the Internet, but China has come the closest of any country in the world to doing just that.  It requires an array of monitoring devices, targeting external and internal platforms, and human resources to look for possible violations.  There was a good case in point in the Wall Street Journal today, describing just one company that is being forced to look at all the content of its apps.  This is like asking Facebook or YouTube to look at everything on it -every day, all the time.  The volume of traffic makes that impossible - not difficult or any variation of that - impossible.  Yet, China has censorship rules that affect every app the population uses.  It is, after all, for their own good.

The Journal has described what one company, Huajiao, a video streaming service must do to try to comply with the law.  Imagine sitting at a screen set up to watch 60 video streaming sessions at a time and trying to look for violations.  It would be easy if a woman took off her clothes (they do) but there are subtle variations of that, like showing some skin and promising more that make that a difficult task.  Huajiao has a staff of people working 24-hours a day, just to keep up.  This is just one company, so there are hundreds of companies doing similar types of censorship.

You have to ask yourself if this is a good thing for the country.  Everyone knows that someone is watching every video service and every chat session that is being conducted.  It may just be a keyword search, but it is looked at by someone if  keywords come up.  That kind of intrusive watching must play on a population.  This is not the NSA kind of collecting that can be used for analysis if something comes up- this is real-time, content monitoring on every person in the country.   Imagine how you would feel if you knew someone was watching all the time.

Businesses are spending a fortune on resources to do this kind of monitoring.  Just salaries of humans to try to examine every little human exchange is an enormous cost.  That cost has to be paid by consumers.  So, tomorrow Comcast says "New government regulations have prompted a policy change to our subscribers.  We are going to be raising prices by 5% to pay for censors to monitor all the live streaming and textual content that is going over the Internet."  If you think about it, that kind of policy and that kind of expense are not possible in most countries.  We would have a revolution if that kind of thing was proposed.

China might face the same kind of outcome if they didn't monitor every member of their population.  That must play on them too.