💾 Archived View for gmi.noulin.net › mobileNews › 602.gmi captured on 2023-06-16 at 21:27:23. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
2008-07-25 08:50:27
Thu Jul 24, 4:00 AM ET
China has more people online than any other country. But its rulers are also
world-class obstructors of the Internet, a practice sure to be under scrutiny
during the Olympic Games, when foreigners used to Web freedom will visit
Beijing.
How China treats the foreign press during the Games, and especially how it
treats Chinese who help them, will be one story. But the big, ongoing story is
how the government keeps access to the Internet under tight control and uses it
to violate human rights.
Because of restrictions agreed to by American search engine companies Google,
Yahoo, and Microsoft Chinese citizens can see only a portion of the Web
visible elsewhere in the world. The censorship is aimed at topics that the
government regards as threatening to its authoritarian rule.
The government also snoops on dissidents who use the Internet. It has
imprisoned at least 49 "cyber-dissidents" for promoting democracy and freedom
of expression online, says the group Reporters Without Borders. In a 2005 case,
Yahoo China provided the government with information about the e-mail account
of Chinese journalist Shi Tao. It led to his arrest and a 10-year jail term.
Yahoo later apologized and has since sold a majority stake in Yahoo China to a
Chinese firm.
Google and the other Internet companies fear losing access to the huge Chinese
market if they don't bend to the government. In actions that must make the
censors smile, they are blocking more of the Web than they need to, according
to a study last month from the University of Toronto's Open Net Initiative.
Individually, the four top Chinese search engines Google, Yahoo China,
Microsoft, and Baidu, a Chinese company blocked between 15 percent (Google)
and 26 percent (Baidu) of a group of controversial sites. Yet they overlapped
in blocking only 10 percent of the sites, showing that the government had
issued no list of banned sites but left the companies to guess and overguess
what might offend.
What can the US do about this? In the House, Rep. Christopher Smith (R) of New
Jersey has introduced a bill that would require search firms to reveal any
request for information about users from countries known to abuse the Internet.
Such information would go to the US Justice Department, which would decide if
such actions represent political oppression or legitimate law enforcement. The
US government also would be informed of key words or Web addresses that these
countries censored.
The legislation, entitled the Global Online Freedom Act, has the backing of
several human rights groups. But critics wisely question whether the US
government ought to be the arbiter of which countries qualify for special
watching and what site-blocking and search terms infringe on cyber-freedom.
A better solution would be a voluntary code of conduct among US search
companies. But nearly two years of meetings among them has yielded no such
pact.
China is hardly alone in restricting online freedoms. Egypt, Syria, Russia, and
Burma (Myanmar) are among those countries known to crack down on citizens who
use the Internet to protest.
But when the world's largest country with the most Web users tries to restrict
this global network, it damages the whole Internet and sets a poor example,
especially when China wants to show a new face during the Olympics.