I really don't that the Chinese government cares, and worse still isn't likely to change its attitude any time soon. There has been wholesale blocking of Chinese IP space on mail servers for years, which is far more likely to impact on China's ability to do business with the rest of the world than filtering hostile web traffic. I guess they figure that whatever inconvenience this might cause is more than offset by the revenue stream generated by all that "bullet proof hosting" they provide.

The really annoying thing is, that in addition to providing the Chinese government the ability to control what its citizens see of the Internet, the Great Firewall of China also provides a wonderful opportunity. The Chinese must already be performing some of the most complex egress filtering in existance, the very concept of which seems to be sadly lacking in many western companies. Adding the extra rules to block a huge volume of port scanning, pop-up spamming, forcing email though official gateways to control spam and all the other detritus of the web must be trivial. Suppression of the freedom to access information aside, China has the infrastructure in place to become one of the most well behaved neighbours on the Internet.

Then again, if China were to do this, I wouldn't like to bet that certain western governments wouldn't consider taking a similar approach. All in the name of the so called war against terror of course...

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