If information becomes more difficult to access, are people willing to go to greater lengths to obtain it? There is considerable worry among the literati within China that Google’s almost certain departure solidifies China’s intranet, siloed off from the rest of the world. In my mind this would be one of the worst possible outcomes, in terms of a broad human rights / freedom of information perspective. With this in mind, arguably the most socially responsible course of action would be for Google to remain in China, and provide the best information possible within the context of universal cens0rship (so long as employees aren’t being arrested and interrogated and the operation doesn’t jeopardize normal security efforts).

There would, however, seem to be some possibility that if information becomes more difficult to access, then necessarily the willingness to expend effort and resources would increase, assuming no endogenous change in the information preferences of actors within the system. Within this context, a small increase in the amount of effort above the threshold to evade the GFW provides access to a huge amount of information. The net result in such a scenario is that if more effort is expended, much more information can be accessed. It’s a big assumption, though: as effort required to access information increases, however, so too might some individuals decrease their information preferences to hold effort constant.

That seems to be the most critical question (from a social standpoint) of the entire debacle. If more Chinese internet users realize they are being segmented and learn how to evade the GFW, they then have much more access to the global internet, which is a positive outcome. If, however, the segment of internet users that doesn’t evade the GFW remains constant, then (at least 33% of them) will have even even more limited access. Both trends will occur in tandem; a positive or negative result will depend on the relative strength of each and the individual information preferences of those within the affected group: those who are marginally interested in more information but haven’t yet developed a method to evade the firewall.