China and its crippled data centers

Politics can not be pushed aside on the Chinese shutdown of entire data centers because “illegal content” was found on maybe one of the servers. This wipes the ISP off the face of the planet and anyone affiliated or hosted by that ISP off the planet during the 17th party congress that is going to be happening in mid October if they do not turn them back on.

Meanwhile, Zitian Net, an IDC based in Luoyang, Henan province, was forced to shut down after someone posted “illegal information,” according to an accusation filed by the Ministry of Information. As the IDC was shut down without warning, more than 10,000 Web sites were disconnected, affecting millions of Web users.

An employee who answered the phone at Zitian’s service center said: “One of the most affected clients is a free statistics Web site which has more than 70 servers.” “Of the 10,000 affected Web sites, many of them are government and business Web sites,” the employee, surnamed Yang, told RFA Mandarin service reporter Xiu Yan. Yang said Zitian had been told by Internet regulatory officials that the Web sites wouldn’t be re-opened until after the 17th Party Congress. Source: RFA.org

CNet is also covering the news here.

The Data Center shutdown seems to be focused on blogs and forums where people are speaking what they want to speak and praying that there is not going to be the 2AM knock on the door. While China is risky for people who want to speak their minds about the Chinese government (and this site is blocked in china by the way, check out the greatfirewallofchina.org to see if you are too) this seems like a draconian measure on the part of representatives of the Chinese government.

The idea of shutting down a data center, means that the impact of that is going to extend beyond blogs, although this also makes for a new line of business, just simply business hosting with no web 2.0 components, no feedback, no comments, just flat vanilla business web sites.

Draconian and interesting, almost makes you wonder what is going to happen next.