Psiphon: a tool to bring the information inside China

It’s old news that sites like the BBC, Wikipedia, as well as all those sites relating the recent agitations in Tibet are not accessible from within China. According to this article from Alternatives, the decisions as to what will be accessible from inside the Chinese borders or not is made by a governmental agency employing 30 000 people, with a budget of 28 billions dollars per year.

Citizen lab, a research center from University of Toronto, developed a software called Psiphon, which allows to circumvent government restrictions to keep the information out. According to Dr. Ron Deibert, the architect behind the Psiphon, there are about 40 countries in the world with such restrictions, and China is one of them.

The site describes the software in those terms:

[Psiphon] allows citizens in uncensored countries to provide unfettered access to the Net through their home computers to friends and family members who live behind firewalls of states that censor. – Psiphon website

While this software is an attempt to bring the information to the people – to allow people to exercise their basic human rights, in the words of Dr. Ron Deibert – the top 3 search engines companies are paying lip service to the Chinese regime. According to the same article:

Yahoo! was accused by Amnesty International to give confidential information to the Chinese regime about his online users, which has lead to the arrest of 2 journalists. Microsoft shut down a blog, as was requested by Beijing, and Google has launched a censored version of his search engine to meet the Chinese requirements. – Alternatives (my own translation from French)

It is certainly sad to see a medium like the internet, which was created to freely exchange data, being censored for political purposes, by some countries like China. And it’s ironic to see that some people from outside are trying to change things inside.

The FCC grants Verizon the monopoly

Although the auction game the FCC uses to dish out the waves spectrum to operators may seem fair in the spirit of free markets, we need to think about what happens once the auction is won.

You can see the winner of this auction game as the legitimated owner of a monopoly. Verizon – America’s second largest mobile carrier (after AT&T) – now owns the larger part of the C-block of the 700-megahertz frequencies for a fat $4.7 billion. The Economist makes a parellel with AT&T:

Verizon says it will allow new devices and applications on its network “provided they meet minimal technical standards.” Verizon will be free to set those standards, as well as the charges for access—just as AT&T did before the courts finally ended its stifling monopoly over the American telephone system with the landmark Carterphone decision in 1968. – The Economist

Instead of having one single private entity to own this part of the spectrum, an alternative could be to have a consortium of companies. This consortium would have more plurality (bringing together different interests in the industry) and legitimacy (having the consumers in mind).

The FCC, as its mandate requires, will supervise the usage made by Verizon, but it could have been stricter while attributing those frequencies. The article goes on:

The one thing the FCC could have done, but didn’t, was to insist that open access also meant the winner of the C-block of frequencies would be required to lease airwaves to competitors. […] The FCC ducked the issue, and left Verizon to determine who can operate on its airwaves and why. – The Economist

Verizon paid $4.7 billion to the FCC for the C-block. No doubts the profits will follow soon enough. It’s just a pity that the current big players will grow even bigger.