China Blocking RSS Feeds
The Chinese Government has added a blanket ban on all RSS feeds, according to a report at Ars Technica. — There have been reports previously that Feedburner feeds have been blocked, but to-date information delivered by RSS feeds has generally gone uncensored …
Context & Ripple Effects
China's firewall has been tightening around publishing platforms for two years — Typepad appeared blocked back in October 2005 — but until now the filtering targeted specific sites while RSS delivery itself slipped through uncensored. The Ars Technica report picked up by TechCrunch marks an escalation: a blanket ban on the feed format rather than another domain name.
Feedburner sits at the center of the story, since prior reports of its feeds being blocked were still unconfirmed rumor as of this writing — yet Feedburner is precisely where independent publishers aggregate their distribution, making it the natural chokepoint if the format-level ban holds.
First-order effects
- Chinese readers lose access to feed-based updates from foreign publishers overnight, with no change on the publisher side — content that was reachable via RSS becomes invisible behind the firewall.
- Publishers who route distribution through Feedburner lose their Chinese audience reach entirely, since their single aggregated feed is now caught in the same net as everything else.
Second-order effects
- Publishers serving Chinese readers face pressure to move distribution off centralized feed aggregators and toward channels the firewall has not yet classified, fragmenting how they reach that audience.
- Domestic Chinese aggregators and portals gain relative advantage, because readers cut off from foreign feeds have nowhere else to go for syndicated content.
Third-order effects
- If censorship keeps moving up the stack — from sites (Typepad in 2005) to formats (RSS now) — then any open syndication technology becomes filterable at will, and distribution inside China consolidates around state-tolerated intermediaries.
- Protocol-level filtering sets a precedent other governments can copy: controlling a format is cheaper than chasing every site that uses it.
The trend: China's internet control is shifting from blocking individual websites to blocking entire content-distribution technologies, with each escalation covering more of the open web's plumbing.