Uff Da!

Good article here –> http://blog.fastcompany.com/archives/2006/03/08/chinas_wondrous_web.html

The whole Chinese take on the internet (Do I get credit — or snarls? — for the term “Chinternet? :-) ) is really amazing. I first noticed this about 4-5 years ago when taking business trips to China. It was the easiest place in the world to get internet connections, because every municipality had a free dial-up service. All you had to do was ask at the front desk for the number and voila!, you were on-line (Albeit at 56Kb back then…). It didn’t take long to figure out why the Chinese government was so beneficent — Giving free dial-ups means that they control what you get to see (And perhaps that they get to filter your emails for any interesting commercial or other information…). It’s a bit different now, but only in the sense that you get free ADSL at hotels — The Wizard of Oz still sits behind the curtain pulling levers and issuing puffs of hot air to make you believe only what he wants you to see.

An aside: I added a comment to the blog after the Fastcompany article. Some people just don’t get it at all. They need to step outside of their box, breathe some air from the real world, and then get on with it.

Uff-da!

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