John Kennedy at Global Voices has just posted on new restrictions for the Chinese Internet that will allegedly be enforced during the run-up to the Summer Games and during the Games in Beijing themselves. Kennedy translates a document that has been circulating in BBSs and other Internet sites since June 2, but I’ve been unable to locate any “official” governmental source of it. While that isn’t in itself unusual, I suspect that this may be a hoax because of the unusually restrictive nature of the wording: It actually calls on operators of BBSs and blogs to preemptively shut down such forums even if they have been properly licensed with what Kennedy traslates as a “Specially Recorded Forum” license, “to prevent the forum resulting in the entire website being closed.”

I have no illusions about the likelihood of tightened controls on domestic BBSs and the Chinese Internet in general during the Olympic period. It would be naive not to expect it. But that said, I just don’t think that any regulatory authority would call for something this drastic, given how huge BBS traffic is in China: one authority on BBSs in China has said that 80% of Chinese websites have BBSs attached, and that there are some 30 million posts to them daily in China; in a post called “It’s All About the BBS,” China Internet veteran Tom Melcher pointed out that the level of activity on a given Internet property’s BBSs is really the best way to gauge the level of the site’s users’ engagement.

Beijing has made clear that it intends to allow visitors to China unfettered Internet access during the Games, but what they really mean is access to the Web outside of China. While Western media tends to focus on the so-called Great Firewall of China as the most important means of controlling the Internet (The Atlantic Monthly’s James Fallows is one very prominent exception; his reporting on Internet control mechanisms in China over the last year has been much more nuanced), in fact the GFW is something that affects a relatively small sliver of Chinese Internet users. Restrictions on posting on domestic sites have much more impact on the vast majority of users, and are far more effective to boot: after all, the onus of executing the rules is placed on the operators of sites, and not on ISPs.