The Green Dam incident underscored the notion that the powers that be cannot unilaterally dictate the terms of internet usage in China. Nearly everyday I walk the streets of this fast-paced country I marvel (and sometimes, squirm; and at other times, become annoyed) at how nearly every interaction in China is a negotiation: whether it’s crossing a busy street; vying for space while riding a bicycle in a bike lane; or buying vegetables from a street vendor. The more fractious an issue, the more each negotiation becomes a scrum. A scrum in rugby involves members of opposing teams going shoulder-against-shoulder against each other to kick the ball back to a player on their side. From the outside, scrums look like utter, violent chaos. And yet, deep within the mound of heaving bodies and grinding collar bones is a negotiation of sorts, to get the ball to the players who will push for a score for their team.

In the Chinese internet, though, there is more than one team at play on the field of the internet at any given time. And because of the vastness of the arena of the Web, there are many scrums going on simultaneously that sometimes coalesce into violent melee, like those found in Human Flesh Search Engines, or complete black outs of entire provinces during mass protests.

Online scrums in China as a means to negotiate platforms, domains, rights, limitations and penalties in cyberspace are creating a web space separate from the World Wide Web as the West has come to know and cultivate it. The Fractured Web, as Andrew Hupert calls the dislocation of a portion of the World Wide Web, is the new reality. Andrew is a professor of sales and negotiation at New York University’s campus in Shanghai. He told me over a cup of coffee in a trendy Shanghai cafe a couple weeks back, “No one cares that the central government has blocked Twitter or Facebook or Youtube. Chinese don’t seem upset in the least about it.” After all, he continued, they already have their Chinese equivalents of the social networking sites, and the the Chinese companies are overjoyed that the international competition is off their necks. In other words, Chinese politics and business are sometimes on the same side of the scrum, bundling away access and technologies from Chinese users, with the permission of the netizens themselves. Over the past two months Andrew has written on his blog, China Solved,

Usually industrial and national security policies are at odds with one another. This time they dovetail beautifully. This must have been a no-brainer for Beijing. Suppress potentially disruptive voices and protect key industries at the same time — in one fell swoop. Everyone from the Party leadership to the business community loves the idea.

I can’t recommend highly enough reading Andrew’s blog thread The Fractured Web. There’s important thinking there for businesses and individuals in China who depend on the international internet for their well-being.

And when you’ve got the ball in China, run like hell.