Bay Networks in bed with commie censors?

Wed Jan 15 23:21:49 UTC 1997

On Wed, 15 Jan 1997, Vadim Antonov wrote:

> Their "partnership" with censors of a communist regime
> is repugnant.  Using the modern technology to build a
> giant brainwashing machine is very scary.

Since you are a person that saw up-front and close the democratizing
effects of a telecommunications network on the democratization of a
communist country, I find this a rather surprising statement.

The network will let more Chinese citizens communicate with each other 
than ever before. And I strongly expect that there will be dozens of
gateways between this "intranet" and China's Internet providers.

You, of all people, should realize that withholding commnications
technology sterngthens and isolates communist regimes. But hooking them
into the global capitalist economy at the state level will eventually pay
dividends by creating a bourgeois class (the educated middle class) which
will force democratization to occur.

Not everybody follows the U.S. model of democracy, for instance Canada
does not. But that doesn't mean we aren't free and it doesn't mean we
aren't happy. 

Have you changed from a Soviet imperialist into an American imperialist?
Don't you realize that parallelism can be exploited in politics as well as
in routing? Create millions of small opportunities for Chinese people to
share information and they will do the rest.

Michael Dillon                   -               Internet & ISP Consulting
Memra Software Inc.              -                  Fax: +1-250-546-3049
http://www.memra.com             -               E-mail: michael at memra.com