How to bring Internet freedom to China

We commonly condemn China's draconian controls on Internet usage. But amazingly, there is a way that we in the United States can give everyone in China Internet freedom. Currently, it is fairly easy to set up a proxy server that allows a Chinese web surfers to access the Internet as if he or she was living in America. The problem with proxy servers is that if the server becomes popular, the Chinese government will block the web address of the server and punish those trying to use it.

The solution is to host the web server on the domain of a critical business site. A huge number of Chinese businesses run off of Microsoft services. When I spent time in China, most of the people I met used Microsoft Hotmail for their email - work and personal. Block Hotmail and the government cripples tens of millions of people going about their daily business. Other business critical web sites include American corporate sites, such as Microsoft Update, Google, PayPal, and Chase Manhattan Bank. The government cannot ban those services without suffering severe economic repercussions.

An of Congress should require that all major US companies doing business with China host proxy servers on their domains. A person in China would simply go to https://www.hotmail.com/FreeInternet/ and be able to access the entire web without restriction. By using the secure "https" protocol, the "FreeInternet" part of the address would be encrypted. Thus the Chinese government would have absolutely no way of detecting whether the user was using the free internet or sending a business email. Chinese citizens would be completely free to write blogs, read foreign news, and engage in political discourse all with complete security and anonymity.

Even without an act of Congress, we in free countries can create these proxy services by convincing the right organizations to host the servers on their domains. Domains such as apache.org or mozilla.org would be very difficult for China to block without doing severe damage to their software industry. We could build a movement to host proxy servers on these types of domains.

I'd love to hear your feedback about this proposal. If you think it's a good idea, please spread it around. We can start a movement to bring Internet freedom to China.