Venyu Blog

We interrupt our regular programming to bring you news about the city of Chongqing China where a “cloud development zone” now under construction will ultimately offer uncensored Internet access, but only for foreign businesses while walling it off, so to speak, to the “indigenous” population.

As related in this InfoWorld article, the city’s Cloud Computing Special Zone will be home to a handful of state-of-the-art data centers and is designed to attract investment from multinational companies and boost China’s status as a center for cloud computing

According to InfoWorld, to attract business the Chongqing municipal government will provide the site with unrestricted access to the Internet, meaning companies located there won’t be restricted by China’s pervasive Web filtering system.

Not surprisingly, that has sparked uproar among some Chinese Internet users, because the unfiltered Web access will be available only to foreign companies.

Like other countries that have tried to suppress the Internet—mostly, of late, due to citizen uprisings in notably un-democratic principalities—China is infamous for its Web censorship, which is used to block politically sensitive or anti-government content. Foreign websites including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube all have been routinely blocked. Government censors block users from posting or searching for certain keywords on social-networking sites.

The Chongqing Economic and Information Technology Commission, which is overseeing development of the cloud zone, declined to comment on whether the media reports about Web access were accurate. A spokeswoman said the commission continues to “push forward” with the project.

News of the special zone was first reported earlier this month by the Chinese publication “Southern Weekly.” Some online news reports on the topic have since been taken down, likely by censors. One Chinese reporter who covered the story said in an interview that his government sources came under pressure after his article appeared and would no longer discuss it.

On face value alone this is one hot potato. To say nothing, of course, in being a double standard. It’s one thing for a Western-headquartered company to establish a base of operations in China, complete with a physical building, infrastructure and native-speaking staff. It’s quite another when the data diffused throughout that infrastructure is (or can be) defined by external hosts as problematic due to its content or the images it contains. Imagine, hypothetically, if your data was being backed up in a foreign country where Western influences are still largely shunned and where the population is subject to the whims of political gamesmanship that mark (most) non-democracies such as the lack of free speech or right of free assembly.

On that tipping point Phelim Kine, an Asia researcher with New York-based Human Rights Watch suggests when he points out the irony inherent in creating this “municipal” paradigm: “The Chinese government is marketing an uncensored, unfiltered Internet connection as a selling point, while they so blatantly and purposely deny that right to the vast majority of their [1.3 billion]citizens.

Finally, this cloud computing zone – while an oasis for western development and free communication—also parallels what’s at stake when it comes to reconciling the advantages as well as the challenges associated with cloud computing: it’s borderless, irrespective of geographic boundaries, but all in all it’s still very much a server-based technology. Whether that server is located in Mom and Pop, USA or a suburb of Beijing, your data has to reside somewhere. What would happen if your data, virtually residing in a foreign company that at first decided to let it in, unfettered, then changed its mind and now your data–the lifeblood of your organization, was suddenly at risk? At the very least this all seems problematic. Self-serving as it is to say it, it’s also an opportunity, a time out really, to ask your cloud computing supplier where, exactly, will your data reside once, ala Elvis, it has (virtually) left your building?

Seems to me this cloud computing zone in China is yet another challenge found in the Wild West frontiers of cloud computing, requiring the equivalent of a data “sheriff” to maintain law and order, as well as to ensure unregulated data access and availability.

Or you could just backup your data with Venyu and visit the Great Wall of China when you next have the chance. Like on a trip, with a tour group. Where the only data you have or need is your new digital camera, manufactured in, of course…

Well, you know what I mean.