Challenging Fake Internets

It has been just over a month since I published my Top Ten Predictions for this year. In general, I expect these predictions to occur sometime during the year (but generally not in weeks), and I try to make them specific enough that they can actually be ranked right or wrong.

With oil, it was easy: either oil would hit $100 per bbl in 2008, or it wouldn’t. At the time I made the prediction, oil was in the 80’s after a steep decline, and continuing to head south.

But the forces I was counting on (almost all of them non-direct) came into play earlier, and this became the first prediction to come true.

I think the most difficult prediction, from all aspects, had to do with suggesting that Fake Internets, put up by governments in place of the real Net to separate its citizens from reality, would come under serious attack. After all, why now? Why, at all, after all these years? etc.

So, it was the most serious risk, I think, on the list.

Here is today’s NYTImes story on China, the young Chinese, and how upset they are getting as they discover they’ve been blocked from all or parts of Yahoo, MySpace, Google, Wikipedia, and other general global information sources – including some of their own sites – by the Fake Net they themselves call the Great Firewall.

I highly recommend anyone complacent about free speech, here or abroad, take a look at this story. If you can get there on your government’s version of the Net:

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/04/world/asia/04china.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin