I just read a blog post “How to bring Internet freedom to China” from Patrick Fitzsimmons, he suggest  to host the web server on the domain of a critical business site, so China goverment will not block those web site:

 The solution is to host the web server on the domain of a critical business site. A huge number of Chinese businesses run off of Microsoft services. When I spent time in China, most of the people I met used Microsoft Hotmail for their email - work and personal. Block Hotmail and the government cripples tens of millions of people going about their daily business. Other business critical web sites include American corporate sites, such as Microsoft Update, Google, PayPal, and Chase Manhattan Bank. The government cannot ban those services without suffering severe economic repercussions.

An of Congress should require that all major US companies doing business with China host proxy servers on their domains. A person in China would simply go to https://www.hotmail.com/FreeInternet/ and be able to access the entire web without restriction. By using the secure “https” protocol, the “FreeInternet” part of the address would be encrypted. Thus the Chinese government would have absolutely no way of detecting whether the user was using the free internet or sending a business email. Chinese citizens would be completely free to write blogs, read foreign news, and engage in political discourse all with complete security and anonymity.

Even without an act of Congress, we in free countries can create these proxy services by convincing the right organizations to host the servers on their domains. Domains such as apache.org or mozilla.org would be very difficult for China to block without doing severe damage to their software industry. We could build a movement to host proxy servers on these types of domains.

Firstly, as a Chinese who deep sufered by the Great Fire Wall (GFW), I should say thanks to Patrick, thank him gave a solution to bring Internet freedom  to China.

However,  unfortunately, this idea totally can’t work, even if the US goverment can push company to provide such proxy, or a great amount of company willing to do so, it still helpless:

• Greate Fire Wall can easily block partial web site based on the URL pattern. That’s to say even all popular web site implement a “/proxy/…” service for us, those part could be easily wiped off by our Great Fire Wall.
•  ”Block Hotmail and the government cripples tens of millions of people going about their daily business”, yes, but will our GFW care a shit?! NO, they don’t care. They blocked Google, the blocked Sourceforge, they blocked FreeBSD, they blocked Wikipedia, … Any thing which threaten the interests of GFW will be blocked, no matter how many people may be affected. Unfortunately, that’s the situation in China.
• Will those “big” company be so kind to provide such proxy? No, I don’t think so.  Actually, I never expect them to be this good, I only wish they could not sell us to the government…but unfortunately they did, just no too long ago, Yahoo provided  personal email content to our government and eventually become a evident to put someone in prison! Even google surrened, they run a selfcensored version google  “google.cn” in China.
• How about apache.org, mozilla.org ? No, please not, even they willing to so, I believe many Chinese people wish NOT!  because all we know that only make us lost apache and mozilla in the future forever! At least now we can still access them easily.

Internet freedom is not a technical problem, so technical solution may not so easy to help.

At last, I should still say thanks to Patrick, let’s pray that some day in the future, free Internet access will not just a dream anymore.

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