China Herald

The rather irrational behavior of China's internet censorship over the past few months has caused quite some irritation and speculation on what the guys and girls behind the buttons might be up to. Most analysis comes as a burst of anger, like yesterday when suddenly Yahoo found itself on the wrong side of the Great Fire Wall. Especially the weblogs hosts like Blogger, wordpress and typepad have suffered from this behavior.

Just like most commentors I have no technical insights in what is really happening, but my take might be different from most who blame directly the authorities for each single action of nanny. My estimation is that just the oposite is happening: the machines are taking over.

Up to not so long ago, nanny was relative predictable. It had it system of blocking IP-addresses that was mostly adjusted on the first working day of the month, unless there was a particular urgent crisis going on. On top of that there was an automated system of key word filtering, triggering off smallish punishments like a temporary block between the computer involved and the IP-address hosting the banned words.

Since a few months an increasing number of incidents shows a shift in behavior. A larger number of nation-wide IP-blocks occurred whithout obvious reason and often disappeared in a day or so. What I expect is happening it that nanny is trying to automate the whole blocking system on a higher level.

Key in understanding the bureaucracy behind the internet censorship is the fact that it is a bureaucracy. An obvious need of any bureaucracy is decreasing the workload. The system of blocking IP-addresses in any system would by now no longer be possibly to be done by humans, especially not by humans who do not like overtime.

What we now see is the finetuning of a new blocking system that should reduce the worldload of nanny, but is obvious working less than perfect. So, in that way there are no new policies, but new systems.