Freezing Winter for Internet in China

My friends Lv Xinxin comes from Beijing today and we had a nice lunch with other friends from websites. We chatted a lot about the status of many of our friends - most of them run websites.

Xinxin brought me back to the year of 2005. I said so, because 2005 is the Spring for Internet in China. The global Internet recovered from the Internet bubble crisis in 2003 to 2004, and in China, the real beginning was 2005. Many websites emerged at that time, and we had interesting gathering so frequently at that time. I got to know Xinxin at that time, and I got to know many of my current friends in the Internet space in that year.

In 2006, people were busy developing their sites, and in 2007, many of them faced big challenge in both financial sides, and from business model side. In 2008, I started to hear bad news of shutdown of websites. Many of others were just trying very hard to keep their head above the water. In 2009, it is the end of many sites. Many sites went bankrupt due to financial reasons - very reasonable, but to my greatest angry, many of them were shutdown in this new round of Internet cracking down.

Today, I heard some other bad news about websites.

It is obvious to me that THEY are tightening the Internet control. There are rumor that they will implement something called “whitelist” for Internet sites outside China. The rumor was, only those sites who register with the Chinese government can be accessed by people in China. I just don’t believe it. It is so naive to think about this idea, but many naive, and impossible measures were already taken that I am not 100% sure that they won’t do stupid things like this.