chinese internet | Made in Atlantis

The forbidden images of the Chinese internet

March 5, 2020March 5, 2020

Nothing reflects the lasting potency of the iconic “Tank Man” photo quite like the dogged attempts to censor it on China’s internet. Practically any image that so much as gestures at the famed photograph of a man in front of a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square risks deletion from the country’s closely monitored web; recreations showing a line of books approaching a cigarette package, a swan before an oncoming truck and a grasshopper in front of a tire have all been removed.

Article Base / Internet and Technology / Special Features

The future of internet – What comes next?

May 22, 2019May 22, 2019

In 2010, a delegation of countries – including Syria and Russia – came to an obscure agency of the United Nations with a strange request: to inscribe those same sovereign borders onto the digital world. “They wanted to allow countries to assign internet addresses on a country by country basis, the way country codes were originally assigned for phone numbers,” says Hascall Sharp, an independent internet policy consultant who at the time was director of technology policy at technology giant Cisco.