Success

China has unblocked wikipedia partially. This was due to the usefulness of wikipedia and the fact that so many Chinese were getting around the block and accessing it. wikipedia made no concessions to censorship. PRC is selectively blocking some articles, which isn’t great, but that’s where the work should be. Google and Microsoft and many of the companies in China allow the censorship to be outsourced to them. This is a scalable solution for the Chinese government, and should be stopped. If Google et al. would stand up to China and make them do their own censoring it would increasingly become unsustainable.

Google has been thinking about their move, which is amazing for a publically traded company to admit it even might be wrong. Maybe they will be moved my wikipedia’s resolve.