Well, We May Never Hear From Terry Again

Yglesias:

China to Require All PCs Include Internet-Censoring Software

[T]he Chinese market is so enormous that China can impose rules like this new one and know that many companies will want to play along:

China has issued a sweeping directive requiring all personal computers sold in the country to include sophisticated software that can filter out pornography and other “unhealthy information” from the Internet. The software, which manufacturers must install on all new PC’s starting July 1, allows the government to update computers regularly with an ever-changing list of banned Web sites.

This also highlights why political developments in China are so crucial for the entire world. If, say, Iran tried to do this it almost certainly wouldn’t fly. But companies will fall all over each other to cater to the Chinese market. Then, once the technology is in place other autocracies can try to piggyback on work that’s been done in and for China. But absent China, almost all of world output would be happening in democratic nations, and it would be easy to structure the global economy in the kind of way optimists were hoping it would work for China.