There may be no longer-running struggle on this earth than China's ongoing attempts to regulate and control its Internet cafes. The latest attempt by the Government to enforce good behavior upon surfers in public venues came a week or so ago, in the form of an announcement that all licensed Internet cafes in the capital will be required to install monitoring software by the end of the year.

So is it worth getting outraged and firing off angry letters to, um, well, whoever you can fire an angry letter off to in China? Probably not.

I feel like somebody's watching me...

Since Internet cafes first started spreading in China a few years ago, the Government has been concerned about them. This has been partly because of the Government's general sensitivity about information available on the Net, but also for more prosaic reasons such as the association of Internet cafes with various kinds of seedy offline behavior and a history of less than rigorous safety management.

There are, by some estimates, well over 100,000 Internet cafes in China, serving a healthy chunk of the country' 110 million Internet users. As you can imagine, trying to keep so many small and relatively mobile businesses on the straight and narrow is something of a chore. Bandwidth is easily and relatively speaking anonymously available in urban areas. Anyone with enough capital to lay in a handful of dirt-cheap desktops can and often do start an Internet cafe.

Over the past five years, the Government has tried licensing Internet cafes, shutting down the unlicensed ones, installing software on their computers (it's already been done in other cities), installing cameras, banning minors from Internet cafes (as well as from online games where players kill each other, no matter where they are played from), mass inspections, and launching a pair of spooky-cute cartoon cybercops named "Jingjing" and "Chacha" (from jingcha, the Mandarin word for police) who can suddenly pop up on the computers of surfers venturing into forbidden territory. Customers also have to show legal ID to use computers in licensed Web bars, both as proof of age and so they can be identified with a given machine.

Jingjing and Chacha are on the job

Net result of all this: Internet cafes in China are still a complete swamp. It's hard to imagine any other nation that ties itself up in knots over this is issue as much as China.

New technologies are also changing the shape of this struggle. While Internet cafes are easily defined and the legal ones forced to conform to regulations, there is a growing number of relatively unregulated public Wi-Fi hotspots in China. It's still rare for the under-18 set to have wireless laptops, but check back again in three or four years. And, for those who want the joys of anonymity while surfing from home, there are tools like Maxthon. Meanwhile, cheap computers and cheap bandwidth mean Internet cafes will probably continue to proliferate.

Expect the struggle to continue for a while yet.