The Great Firewall of China is more than a political instrument of speech control. It is a mechanism of market power to effect the valuation of attention.
Jason Calacanis notes the direct impact the Firewall has had on site traffic through Alexa rankings:
The theory right now is that the Chinese government has been blocking a bunch of top websites causing their pageviews to nosedive. As such those websites—Chinese language ones—took a major drop in the [Alexa] rankings. Their drop means the other (read US sites) spike. Assuming the Chinese government lets people back on those sites in a couple of weeks we should see all the US sites drop back down.
China has the second largest body of users in the world and is expected to eclipse the US in a few years. Market sway in the most valuable commodity, attention, demands attention itself. Online advertising is only a nominal portion of GDP, so there is little incentive to block advertising markets for purpose of economic disruption. But there is a marginal incentive to block the attention of Chinese surfers for protectionist benefits. If the only way to reach the online Chinese consumer is through Chinese sites that play by their rules, US advertisers will place their bets there.
The net can route around speech filters, but consumption in commerce cannot adapt so quickly. This is but a scenario, but one worth watching, as Market-Leninism is an evolving form.
