Weekend Roundup: From Beijing to Moscow, a Digital Curtain Descends

In March 1946, Winston Churchill famously declared that an "iron curtain" had descended across the European continent, casting a decades-long chill between East and West known as the Cold War. A new chill is in the air once again as China and Russia seek to draw a new "digital curtain" across the world in a joint effort to thwart the Western web from penetrating their cultural space.

If the arrival in Moscow last week of China's Internet czar, Lu Wei, to advise his Russian counterpart on how to erect a "firewall" against the West is any indication, a new "Cominternet" for the 21st century seems to be in the works -- analogous to the so-called "Communist International," or "Comintern," which linked communist parties around the world from Moscow to Beijing during the Stalin era.

More...