[LINK] "‘Father’ of China’s Great Firewall Shouted Off Own Microblog"

[rfmcdonald]

I found this Wall Street Journal post via a passing mention in an article describing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's visit to China and search engine Baidu.

Fang Binxing, known as the “father of China’s Great Firewall,” recently created a user account on one of China’s most vibrant online public forums, microblogging service Sina Weibo, but Chinese Internet users hardly greeted the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications president with a welcome mat.

Instead, they flooded his account with a stream of often vicious comments and curses that effectively chased him off the service.

Users said Mr. Fang’s earliest posts dated back to a few days ago, but that few people noticed his microblog until he wrote a message to famous CCTV anchor Jing Yidan (“Hi, I’m on Weibo now, although I don’t dare be as outspoken as you all, haha”) on Monday morning. After that, the comments, most reflecting the displeasure of many over the limitations on their use of the Internet, began piling up.

The Chinese government regulates Internet use in a number of ways. Internet companies in China, including Sina, need licenses to operate, and are required to police themselves, filtering out any illegal content, which ranges from pornographic to politically sensitive material. Websites based elsewhere may be blocked in their entirety or users can be periodically locked out if they continuously surf onto Web sites that contain certain key words.

The technology used to accomplish this—said by official media to have been built with substantial input from Mr. Fang–is often referred to as the Great Firewall, or GFW. In recent years an increasing number of Chinese Internet users are learning about its existence and–to a lesser extent–about how to circumvent it. Meanwhile, services like microblogging are speeding up the flow of information, making it more difficult to control.

Some commenters appeared to hope that their harsh reactions would limit Mr. Fang’s ability to use Sina Weibo the way the GFW limits Internet access within China. “Fang Binxing, GFW has deprived people’s rights to freely access the Internet, and now people want to deprive you of the right to use micro-blogging,” one user wrote. “But if you are not happy with it, go ahead and list t.sina.com.cn on your blacklist.”

China Digital Times has more.

Is all this China's human flesh search engine at work, looking for Internet malefactors to punish?