Tim Berners-Lee defends principles of the web in his article “Long Live the Web.” He says that the Web is critical to free speech as a medium which is based on egalitarian principles. Berners-Lee mentions that universality, decentralization, open standards should be the principles and features of the Web in order to make itself powerful enough. The threat to these principles, includes the increasing tendency of internet censorship, consumerism, and the dictatorship of technology giants. What Berners-Lee mentions about the Web is quite cogent, but it would be more interesting to present his ideas in the Chinese context. Even though the Web could exhibit democratic values, the authorities treat it in a different way. The Web media, however, should be the mouthpiece of the Party and lead the public opinion, says CPC News. The threat of the universality principle is shown in the Chinese landscape as well. Berners-Lee mentions that it is dangerous to see “one search engine . . . gets so big that it becomes a monopoly” (82). In 2016, Wei died from cancer after he’s getting medical treatment from a hospital where he had found to be listed the top in the search result of Baidu.com, the biggest Chinese web searching engine, and it caused a social panic. It was found that the reason why that hospital would be listed top was that Baidu treated it as a commercial advertisement.
Ingrid Burrington discovers the geopolitics of the “cloud” in his article “The Strange Geopolitics of the International Cloud.” Although technological and climate concerns are part of the considerations to build “data centers,” political concerns also need to be considered given the increasing call of data sovereignty. In the Chinese context, this article reminds me of the news on the data center of Apple in China. In 2020, a new data center will be open in Guizhou Province to dedicating itself as a holder of iCloud data for Chinese mainland users, according to Xinhua News. Although Guizhou province is not a technologically advanced or talent-attracting place to build a data center, the Chinese data of iCloud are to be saved here mostly because of political concerns.