The Artful Jurist

Perhaps China just doesn't get the web. The government of the world's most populous nation seems to spend a lot of time trying to reign in the chaos that is the Internet. Now it appears to have blocked the web site of Google, arguably the world's most popular search engine. The reason given?...Google allows access to pornography.

Okay, I understand the desire to protect children from images they're not ready to fully comprehend and understand. But every one of these types of "For the love of God, won't someone think of the children!" efforts to guard the tykes from accidentally bumping into wee-wees on the web ends up also blocking fine art that also happens to contain wee-wees or (perhaps even more dangerous) words that are potentially applicable to pornographic uses. Here, of course, that raises First Amendment issues. In China, where they've got no Bill of Rights to lean on, the bigger issue with this sort of thing tends to be economic. (Whose commercial enterprise is being stymied by the blockage.)

Now I don't want to seem critical of a nation that wants to protect its children from pornography. But, from what I've noted in the past, China's idea of pornography tends to be a lot more inclusive than many other places. A Chinese woman I once knew told me that the Chinese are a very conservative people when it comes to sex. My response was that I have a billion reasons why I can't say I fully believe that.