Posted on 01/15/2006 1:18:29 PM PST by nickcarraway
Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong explains, and he says U.S. companies need to take a stand against Beijing
The news that Microsoft (MSFT ) shut down a Chinese blogger's site at the request of Beijing officials is bringing a renewed focus on the role U.S. companies play in helping China control the Internet. It's no secret that Western businesses that want to enter the Internet market in China have to do some unsavory things. The Chinese government, determined to prevent dissidents from using the Net to promote taboo subjects such as the Falun Gong religious movement, formal independence for Taiwan, or an end to Communist Party rule, pressures providers to play by Chinese rules and control the content that's available for local Net surfers (see BW Online, 1/12/06, "The Great Firewall of China").
When companies do restrict what their Chinese users send or read on the Net, however, they face howls of criticism from activists, bloggers, and ordinary folks abroad who think that multinationals should not be helping Beijing police the Net. Nicholas Bequelin, the China research director for Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong, recently spoke with Bruce Einhorn of BusinessWeek's Hong Kong bureau about censorship and the Net in China. Edited excerpts follow:
How big a role do foreign companies play in helping China control the Net? China would not have succeeded in censoring the Net without the support and cooperation of foreign IT companies. This is the inescapable truth. This is the problem that has to be addressed.
Yahoo! (YHOO ) got slammed last year for cooperating with a Chinese government investigation that led to the imprisonment of a journalist. Do you think Yahoo acted irresponsibly?
(Excerpt) Read more at businessweek.com ...
Does Al Gore know about this?
WTF?
What a piece of creative writing.
I will concede that it seems China does control GOOGLE.
Or: "How BusinessWeek Pulls Headlines Out Of Its A$$"
Does Al Gore know about anything?
BTTT
How do you define control? Seriously?
It seems to me, I am allowed to post every Chicomm bash opninion I want rather openly on the net. Seems to me, the US still maintains control over the "system critical" servers in regard to the net...remember those were the ones that the UN wanted to ursurp control of.
China's a threat to peace, stability, and freedom within their region...but they hardly "control" the internet.
In Hoc.
By exerting a very significant effect on what goes on, as the article describes. I'll concede that the headline stretches the limit of semantic accuracy at little, because the Chinese aren't exerting complete control, or even majority control. So that can just be chalked up to a magazine being a little overzealous in coming up with an eye-grabbing headline. But it appears to tell the truth in that China does exert a considerable amount of control, by making big companies engage in self-censorship as the price of admission to the Chinese market.
Anyway, I recommend looking the article over. Newspaper and magazine articles usually pay closer attention to accuracy in the main bodies of their articles than in their headlines.
dontcha mean googer
i'm solly... so solly...
teeman
I was chatting with a friend in Shanghai, I guess I mentioned a sore subject because I was cut off and can no longer chat with him. When he came home for Christmas, he asked me what happened to me!!! He has had a few of his friends here in the states cutoff from chatting with him. He said they even monitor his cell phone and his land line phones.
Don't those commies know they can be impeached for that?
I suggest they better get some friends in congress.
Well, never mind...I think they already have friends in congress.
Through spam. 90% of the spam I receive apparently originates from China, according to the Spamcop method.
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