I'm sure Paris is now dispatching a delegation to Beijing to start working on an alternative.

The Chinese do indeed have some amazing mathematicians -- cracking SHA-1 is no small feat (link.) That said, it's not as if Americans are at all bad at maths.

In any case, what government influence are the Chinese talking about? This genie is out of the bottle. Even if the world's governments did try a power grab for the public Internet, there is no way they could prevent alternate protocols and peer-to-peer private networks from taking its place. And all the "interesting" people would be using those, leaving governments to spy on emails from grandma.

I thought the Putin comment was simultaneously hilarious and scary. I assumed Putin was a clever macchiavellian, hence in possession of an accurate world view to be used for nefarious purposes, but this leads me to think his grasp of reality is rather limited, which bodes ill for Russia and its neighbors.

Or maybe he is pretending.

Stefan,
the Chinese have actually done a very good job at controlling internet content on their soil. They have built effective firewalls. Yes, some information leaks in, but overall there is no free access to information that the government does not want circulating there. So from Beijing's point of view, the genie is very much in the bottle - albeit threatening at the stopper.

As for Putin, I agree, it's both funny and scary. But his clumsy hand in Ukraine already revealed a basic lack of understanding about democracy, popular aspirations, and how the West works.

To be fair, of course, the fact that this is shocking goes to show that we don't really understand what makes Russia tick, either.

THe first thing that came to my head when I started reading this story, was "invent your own freaking internet." Glad to see you agree.

Simultaneously thoughtful and hilarious! Good work!

I thought the Putin comment was simultaneously hilarious and scary.

I also agree, Stefan. It was a sort of "Haha, this guy just doesn't get it. [Long Pause] Oh my God. This guy really doesn't get it."

It's odd that men like Gorbachev and Yeltsin understood that power can move in directions other than top to bottom, while Putin - despite being much younger and having lived outside Russia in East Germany - does not. In light of this, Putin's anti-democratic moves become easier to understand: the power belongs to him, why waste time and energy with inefficient bickering?

I'm not clear about Sterling's objection to the Chinese government's interventions on the Internet. Are you concerned that the intervention will be effective in repressing dissenting views (a la Tiananmen) or ineffective (a la Italians running things), or is your point that the US would be a better supervisor of Internet content? Surely a government has some rights to intervene in the private communications of its citizens. For example, the US wiretaps suspected terrorists. For domestic security reasons, the Chinese have limited some freedoms. While it's true that their perceptions of the proper boundary between private and public is different than that of the US, I would comment that this boundary is dynamic, depending on the political environment and is moving in the US as well

The Chinese government has been effective in promoting the general welfare of its citizens over the past twenty years, radically improving GDP per capita and providing superb infrastructure for future development. If the international Internet infrastructure provided by ICANN isn't meeting their needs, they certainly have both market critical mass and the political rationale to permit them to effect changes to that infrastructure. When China overtakes the US as the world's largest economy in about ten years, the US may find itself making changing to the accepted (Chinese-specified) global infrastructure to suit their local needs, and we would hope the Chinese would appreciate those local needs.