February 14, 2013
China has long been one of the leaders when it comes to Internet censorship, and as Paul Mozur and Carlos Tejada of the Wall Street Journal report, government meddling is having a negative effect on the economy:
Experts say the blocks that keep Chinese users from accessing services like Facebook, Twitter and Google Inc.‘s online-video unit YouTube, are hurting businesses, slowing their traffic and hindering their use of a new generation of cloud-computing services like those offered by Google.
Akamai Technologies, which provides services to help websites speed up connections, says China’s average connection speed ranked 94th globally in last year’s third quarter, well behind Asian rivals like Malaysia, at No. 71, and Thailand, at No. 58.