Can the Internet ever be controlled as governments might wish it to be ?

Blogging grows in China, despite obstacles.  I think I take issue with the headline ...  "Monster" ?  From whose perspective ?

Via the Globe and Mail

Beijing's censors unleash a monster
A farmer's son is using the blog to change Chinese web culture

The author of the banned articles, a young journalist named Fang Xingdong, was an outspoken critic of the software giant Microsoft. But two hours after his critical essays about the company were published on July 6, 2002, they suddenly disappeared from every website in the country, deemed too controversial.

"I had been one of the pioneers of the Internet in China," he recalls. "Yet after six years of being published on the Internet, suddenly I couldn't get on any websites."

Frustrated and angry, he talked to a friend who mentioned the emergence of blogging in the United States. He glanced at a few blogs. At first they seemed too primitive. But as he thought about it, he began to see the creative possibilities.

"I was very excited," he says. "I couldn't sleep all night."

Four years later, Mr. Fang is chairman and chief executive of China's biggest blogging empire. His company, Bokee, is host to about 14 million bloggers, a quarter of the entire Chinese market, and it gains more than 10,000 new bloggers every day.

Blogging has become the hottest media trend in China. And his company is so popular that it has attracted the interest of media tycoons such as Rupert Murdoch.

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