media - WSJ's weird look at China's internet censors

The China Digital News quotes an article in the Wall Street Journal in an overview of two recent reports on how China tries to censor the internet. While both reports are rather factual, the Wall Street Journal looks at them from a very biased political angle.
Added together, these reports are helping to flesh out the shape of what critics have dubbed "the Great Firewall of China" and show how successful China has been in bringing to heel the Internet, which was once championed abroad as an unruly marketplace of ideas that would promote free expression. The communist government has jailed people for disseminating politically critical views, in part to serve as a warning to other Web users, the WSJ writes.
Well, that is a way of looking at it. The reports show - in my biased view - how little sophisticated the filter methods are, and how marginal they are in this massive development that will have brought very soon 100 million people online in what is - alright, according to Chinese standards - the most free medium China have ever seen over the past half century.
The example of the list of banned words at Tencent's QQ show the real problem censorship in China is having: capacity. Because of the growing traffic the filters bring down the speed of the internet and is causing collateral damage. That is also the line where censorship will stop: the Great Firewall will stop where economic fallout is causing too much damage.
(Tomorrow morning also at my video blog: Thoughts on Friday morning.)