Please Don’t Ban the Outside World

Have you ever heard about the term GFW? Are you now suffering from it? No?

Congratulations. Yes? You are as miserable as me, and we are banned from the outside world.

GFW refers to the Great Fire Wall, and it consists of Internet security policies and techniques

used to enforce those policies in China mainland. It is built up to defense China from cyber-

attacks and make the network environment clean and safe according to official statement. But

what GFW actually do is banning people form visiting many websites while people from any

other places in the world can have free access to. According to government, these bans are done

in the best interest of the people, because they help to keep us protected from evil; or another

popular saying is “for the greater good”. However, those bans are isolating us from the outside

world and they have a vicious influence on the people’s learning, communication and the

development of the country.

Banning people from the outside Internet will affect the learning process. Students, teachers,

scholars, scientists and researchers will do a lot of research before finishing their works.

Research needs access to many different resources including books, articles, videos, audios,

documents or website pages. And search engines such as Google can help a lot locating them.

Having no access to Google means that you have to use many other unprofessional search

engines where the results are a mixture of advertisements and irrelevant websites and you have

to dig the results and maybe find something useful after several pages. That is a suffering

experience for people doing research and it leads to poor efficiency.

Banning the outside Internet also have bad influence on communication. It is 21st century
and Internet should make it easier to communicate with anybody anywhere. So Imagine that your

friends from North-American countries using some app to chat but you cannot use it—it even

doesn’t exist in your app store! And they are sharing their photos on Pinterest, updating their

emotional status on Facebook, and uploading their home-made videos on YouTube…Again, you

input the URLs of these sites and the browser tells you they are not available. Internet was

invented to provide more information and make communication faster and easier, but you cannot

feel any convenience.

Internet bans will also affect the development of the country. Internet plays an important

role in the exchange and cooperation between countries. With help of Internet, we can

communicate with different cultures and know each other better. Internet will help introduce

advanced ideas, culture and technologies to our countries, rather than breaking them or stealing

them from us. Those who consider foreign information are harmful are wrong, or they intend to

do so in order to control the people. I don’t think people with wisdom will slow the development

of their country or even stop it. In fact, on the contrary, only by unblocking the Internet can help

people grow wiser and thus make the country a better home for their people.

To sum up, the bans on the Internet is harmful for people’s interest. The government should

think carefully about that. And I think communication without bans is good both for the country

and its people. Please don’t ban us from the outside world.