Chinese on Iranian web censorship

The IT news site cnbeta has this clip on it today, from China Daily: “Purifying National Culture: Iran Shuts Down Popular Websites”. The Guardian reports on the story here: Iranian government has blocked access to a wide range of sites, from the New York Times to Amazon, Youtube to Wikipedia and the BBC’s Farsi service.  The China Daily Chinese=language version of the story on cnbeta follows the Guardian’s, pointing out the Iranian government’s concern with preserving “national unity”, sensitivity toward “immoral Western values,” and crackdown on satellite TV and publishing industry.

I tried Baidu’ing and Googling the story in Chinese to see if I could find more commentary, but couldn’t find it.  Baidu gave me a “server connection reset” page each time I tried…From among the 33 comments from cnbeta readers:

China’s already almost the same.

What do you mean “almost the same”?  It obviously already is the same!!! Can you get on Wikipedia? ! China has locked out who knows how many websites, and monitors a record of everything you do online no matter how obscure the website (不管网址多少冷门). As long as you are going there often enough, after half a year you can’t get on them anymore!!!  I’ve got a handful of these kinds of websites!

Create a huge Intranet!!!!  It’s the goal of our studies.

Those trashy countries with no human rights do things pretty much the same way.

They’re learning from China.  Think they’ve bought the GFW? [Great Firewall]

Why report on what other people are doing?  Why not report on how China blocks Taiwanese and overseas’ websites?

Iran’s filtering capacity is lame, all they’re doing is blocking a few websites, they’d better import the GFW fast!

At least Iran comes clean and tells you which sites boss is going to shut down.  The GCD [CCP] is more shady, and doesn’t dare to admit to it.

Glorious Middle East ancient kingdom Government!!  Glorious Iranian Government! It’s carrying on the fine traditions of highly reputed 5000 year-old ancient eastern Government. At this moment it’s not a Government that is closing down websites….It’s a part of the glorious spirit of ancient Government. The “dirty” websites are dead!! — [signed] a free person

Every country has an Internet monitoring system, it’s just that the mainland’s is too strict.
How many phone calls has Bush listened in on to catch Bin Laden?  How many emails have been  surveilled?  How many unconscionable acts have been committed? And this is what some people call a democratic country. If you really want to protect your own interests you can consider becoming a ruler or you can think about going to live on Mars.  No government is likely to allow too many things that deviate from its path.  As Li An says, “Every ruler has a GFW in their heart.”

Not bad, not bad!  At least no-one has come out from the “Iranian Ministry of Information Industry” to announce, “We have not blocked any websites.”