SoylentNews

mendax writes:

The Chinese are at it again. The New York Times is reporting on how the Chinese government is building the Great Firewall of China higher:

[E]arlier this week, after a number of V.P.N. companies, including StrongVPN and Golden Frog, complained that the Chinese government had disrupted their services with unprecedented sophistication, a senior official for the first time acknowledged its hand in the attacks and implicitly promised more of the same.

The move to disable some of the most widely used V.P.N.s has provoked a torrent of outrage among video artists, tech entrepreneurs and university professors who complain that in its quest for so-called “Internet sovereignty” — Beijing’s euphemism for online filtering — the Communist Party is stifling the innovation and productivity needed to revive the Chinese economy at a time of slowing growth.

“I need to stay tuned into the rest of the world,” said Henry Yang, 25, the international news editor of a state-owned media company who uses Facebook to follow broadcasters like Diane Sawyer, Ann Curry and Anderson Cooper. “I feel like we’re like frogs being slowly boiled in a pot.”

The importance (and foolishness) of this action is made clear in this paragraph:

“One unfortunate result of excessive control over email and Internet traffic is the slowing down of legitimate commerce, and that is not something in China’s best interest,” said James Zimmerman, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China. “In order to attract and promote world-class commercial enterprises, the government needs to encourage the use of the Internet as a crucial medium for the sharing of information and ideas to promote economic growth and development.”

and this:

“It’s as if we’re shutting down half our brains,” said Chin-Chin Wu, an artist who spent almost a decade in Paris and who relies on the Internet to promote her work overseas. “I think that the day that information from the outside world becomes completely inaccessible in China, a lot of people will choose to leave.”