Wow, China practically shut down the internet

China apparently has eighty million registered internet users. Not sure if registration is like they have an AOL account or they have to get a net license from the government. Cybercafes do have to be licensed in China, but they currently have a moratorium on new licenses and recently closed sixteen thousand cafes for allowing, ahem, indecent material on their computers. Apparently Beijing can successfully mandate certain URL blocks and recently blocked a whole bunch of sites which surfers could find indecent material through, including Google. Yahoo has a giant story about it. Not sure exactly how Beijing would block Google. Not sure who wants Chinese traffic, as most Chinese surfers do not have credit cards or the ability to read most Western languages. But Yahoo seemed almost like they felt competitively happy about the Google block. Hmmmm....

Possibly a conspiracy?

Most Chinese web traffic is funneled through Hong Kong, so they just block domains at the ISP level.