MSN and China

Looks like MSN is censoring things the chinese government doesn’t like a little more than they used to. They just blocked a chinese journalist. It seems they are censoring on their on and not waiting for china to actually request sites be taken down or anything. That’s nice. Also, it doesn’t appear they really care whether you are in china or not. This person did some tests, and got her blog banned with words like falun gong, in chinese but blocked worldwide. That’s pretty cool. I guess it’s easier to enforce china-like censorship everywhere than bother with local laws. Thanks Microsoft. (Scoble is mad)

You know, I think saying Scoble is mad deserves more discussion. Everyone seems to be saying that at the end of this discussion, as if that in any way indemnifies Microsoft. As far as I can tell Scoble doesn’t like any of MS’s stupid policies, and MS doesn’t listen to Scoble about any aspect of their business. It seems he exists only to disagree with MS so people can point at him and in some way make MS not look so bad. I call bullshit. If he doesn’t agree with all these things, there are other companies in the world. I think he is a nice guy with generally good ideas, but I don’t see what purpose he is serving other than giving us a pretty face for an ugly corporation.

Update: Looks like Microsoft bitchslapped Scoble into submission, as usual. You have to think of the employees! and international relations! and being in the content industry, as apparently the blog host MSN spaces thinks it is in, is very difficult! I wonder if blogger thinks of themselves as being in the content industry? Somehow I don’t think so.