Brief program gave Chinese greater internet freedoms
In a quiet experiment of just two weeks, China provided millions of people access to long-forbidden foreign websites l i ke YouTube and Instagram. The trial appears to signal the Communist government is moving toward giving the country’s citizens greater access to the global internet — while still attempting to control who sees what.
The Tuber browser-app, backed by governmentlinked 360 Security Technology Inc., appeared without fanfare in late September and offered for the first time in years a way to view long-banned websites from Facebook to Google and The New York Times, albeit sanitized versions. Chinese users rejoiced in a newfound ability to directly peruse long-blocked content from a mobile browser without an illegal virtual private network or VPN.
The browser, carried on app stores run by Huawei Technologies Co. among others, suggests Beijing is testing ways to let its 904 million internet users into once-prohibited zones. While Tuber bore the hallmarks of state-style censorship and got pulled without explanation Saturday, it’s Beijing’s most significant experiment in years with greater internet freedoms.
Tuber offers a possible compromise — a controlled environment in which activity can be tracked and content screened, while allowing academics, corporations and citizens to exchange information. It addresses a complaint among corporations local and foreign that need to access everything from financial data to critical software tools from abroad.
“This latest development with Tuber is interesting because it could be seen as more openness,” said Fergus Ryan, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. “But the way that it would actually work would mean that people who use it would be highly surveilled, and the information that they are able to access via this platform is filtered by the censorship apparatus.”
Beijing is increasingly confident of support at home after successfully quashing COVID-19. That — and the urgent need to increase the quality of its scientific and technological research — could explain why it’s growing more comfortable with the idea of giving broader access to the internet to some.
Yet it also realizes it faces growing hostility overseas. Beijing, seeking to better police its citizens, still requires companies from Tencent Holdings to TikTokowner ByteDance to censor and scrub content critical of the government or its policies. It tried for years with mixed success to abolish the hundreds of VPNs commonly employed to bypass the Great Firewall. Endorsing a state-sanctioned window to the internet could curtail their usefulness.
That could have implications for the likes of Facebook and Microsoft to Alphabet and Apple, who now either comply with censorship to reach China’s users or remain on the sidelines. Google explored — but shelved under internal pressure — a project to create a filtered version of its app for the country. Facebook flirted with the idea of a Chinese service but ultimately torpedoed that.
Tuber appeared to censor some content, including on YouTube. A search of President Xi Jinping’s name in Chinese yielded seven video clips uploaded by three accounts claiming to be television stations in Shanghai, Tianjin and Macau. Searching for Xi’s name in English yielded no results.
It required mobile number registration, allowing developers to track activity as all smartphone numbers in the country are linked to Chinese identification.