How much money does it cost for the Chinese Govt. to censor the internet?

I get the feeling that that information would be censored, so finding accurate numbers is likely impossible. If anyone does find those numbers, they are likely based on official Chinese sources, so take them with a grain of salt.

Probably not nearly as much as it would cost them if they didnt censor the internet.

Not really anything. There isn’t a huge amount censored, they aren’t particularly quick in response to things they might want to censor, and all it is is a list of banned IPs, which essentially costs nothing to implement & maintain.

@The_Idler Largely true. I imagine that they could assign people to do it in their spare time or as a collateral duty as opposed to hiring full-time censors… but that is sensible and efficient, so my inner skeptic doubts that they do it that way :p

The cost is incalculable. As @The_Idler noted, the front-end cost of blocking a few IPs isn’t large at all. Nor is having a handful of people do continuous unblocked searches on Google for such terms as Tienanmen Square, noting the IP addresses returned, and blocking them. A bot can easily be written to do that.

The true revolt in Tienanmen Square was not a student uprising though, as Chinese propaganda has claimed. It was a people’s uprising against the growing economic disparity and exploitation of workers by the transition to neoliberalism free-market capitainof China. The cost of that pig headed move is enormous in human lives, misery, suffering and loss of creativity among all those not blessed by the ruling hegemony.

Don’t worry about the costs, though. The IMF and World Bank will fully cover whatever the costs might be.