The Chinese Internet

For two decades we have talked about "the Internet" as if it were a thing, and it's properties necessarily those of its American manifestation. Yet China show that this is a fallacy. The Internet is simply the implementation of a set of packet transport protocols, and while those network protocols may well have been developed with network redundancy and resilience as one of the designer's top priorities, tat doesn't mean that those same technologies can't be used in other configurations in networks constructed by engineers following a different set of design parameters. So we shouldn't be surprised that the Chinese Internet is less about information democracy and more about monitoring and control.