In last week's post I filleted the most recent annual report of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. I'll admit, I didn't read every page. If I had, I would have come across the whopper that for a brief period on April 8 China Telecom re-routed 15% of the Internet. The claim was way deep in the report, pages 236-247. The implication is that the global Internet is vulnerable to Chinese manipulation, and fits together seemlessly with manipulation of the Renminbi, the supposed sudden halting of rare earths exports, and mercantilist policies in support of Indigenous Innovation, among other policies. In short, this is another example of how China isn't playing fair.
The only problem -- this is very likely a misreading of the April 8th events. As explained in a blog entry by the consulting firm Renesys, and elsewhere, it is very likely that China Telecom unitentionally routed Internet flows in its direction, and that such mistakes occur quite often, so much so that at the time no one seemed to pay it much attention. I'm told by an Internet expert that this does reflect a real weakness of the Internet that needs to be addressed, but it's not a China-specific problem whatsoever.
This looks like a problem for the Internet Engineering Task Force, which by the way, just had a major conference in Beijing.
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