The Great Chinese Internet Crash; The Internet suffered perhaps its largest crash of all time on Jan. 21, when most of China’s 500 million Web users were unable to get online for up to eight hours

The Great Chinese Internet Crash

Web freedom is the best answer to Beijing’s foreign media crackdown.

Updated Feb. 2, 2014 4:21 p.m. ET

The Internet suffered perhaps its largest crash of all time on Jan. 21, when most of China’s 500 million Web users were unable to get online for up to eight hours. Nine days later New York Times NYT -2.68% reporter Austin Ramzy was forced to leave China, the latest in a string of foreign journalists denied work visas by the Beijing government. What these stories have in common is worth understanding—especially in Washington.

The link is the Communist Party’s obsessive control over information. Mr. Ramzy’s case is all too familiar, since China has long squeezed foreign journalists to punish and deter reporting on sensitive matters such as the family fortunes of China’s top leaders. The case of the Internet crash is more unusual.

Apparently the blackout was caused not by hackers or equipment failure but by the Chinese government’s own Internet censors—the operators of the “Great Firewall.” Instead of denying access to proscribed sites, they accidentally re-routed almost all Chinese Web traffic to a set of foreign sites that are usually blocked. Those servers promptly crashed, and the Chinese Internet ground to a halt.

The foreign sites were among Beijing’s most hated, as they belong to U.S.-based companies that specialize in helping Web users evade firewalls. Through tools such as “UltraSurf” and “FreeGate,” these companies allow millions of regular Chinese (or Iranians, or Cubans) to mask their online identities, bypass state censors, and read news or history as if they were online in New York or Paris.

There’s a lesson here for U.S. policy makers considering how to respond to China’s foreign-media crackdown, which includes years-long visa delays, restrictions on travel within China and occasionally physical violence. Some American lawmakers and commentators propose that Washington adopt reciprocal measures—denying U.S. visas to Chinese journalists, for example, or to more senior Chinese media executives, such as those running the Xinhua news agency’s North American headquarters in Times Square.

Here’s another idea: Increase U.S. government support for firewall-circumvention tools like those that Beijing was trying to stifle on Jan. 21 when it accidentally crashed the Internet. No tit-for-tat visa war, no limits on reporting, but a firmer U.S. policy to expand the free flow of information world-wide.

Hillary Clinton championed this agenda as secretary of state, at least rhetorically. “Nations that censor the Internet should understand that our government is proud to help promote Internet freedom,” she said in 2010. Yet that year a bipartisan group of Senators criticized her department for wasting some $20 million that Congress had appropriated to support “field-tested” Web access tools for “large numbers of users simultaneously in a hostile Internet environment.” State apparently spent most of the money on training programs for local journalists overseas.

In later years the Clinton State Department distributed additional Internet freedom funds to a range of grantees. But today Washington’s most promising source of funding for firewall-circumvention tools appears to be the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the agency that oversees Voice of America. The 2014 appropriations bill passed last month directs the BBG to spend “not less than” $25.5 million specifically on “the development and use of circumvention and secure communication technologies.”

A U.S.-based engineer behind one of the leading firewall-busting technologies tells us that his server capacity is about 1.5 billion hits a day from 1.2 million users world-wide (with one-third coming from China). The engineer, who prefers to remain anonymous for security reasons, says an additional $20 million would allow him to host nearly 20 times as many users per day.

Beijing has devoted enormous resources to Internet censorship but it still struggles to control the flow of information. A modest Western investment could poke holes in the Great Firewall or even bring it tumbling down.