Internet Censorship in China

Human Rights watch released a report yesterday on Internet censoring in China, titled “Race to the Bottom – Corporate Complicity in Chinese Internet Censorship” [1]. It reports that China’s system of internet keyword and URL censoring is highly developed and sophisticated. Such a system, “would not be possible without extensive private and corporate sector cooperation, including by some of the world’s major Internet companies” [2]. The international Internet companies discussed in the report include Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google and Skype.

The report details the kind and amount of censorship on the internet in China through extensive web searches of politically sensitive material. The term “Dongzhou” [3], a village where last year the Chinese police opened fire on local protestors and killed several, returns nothing related to the incident on the first few pages of the search results on Yahoo’s Chinese engine (http://cn.yahoo.com), whereas the international engine (http://www.yahoo.com/) returns tons of relevant material. The report also documents the cases of four vocal critics of the Chinese government who have been prosecuted for dissidence after Yahoo provided the government authorities with user information. This prosecution is a violation of the basic civil human right to free expression and Yahoo’s cooperation has been a contributor.

Google, under Chinese government pressure (who banned google.com at one point), released Google.cn which censors content returned in web search results. Microsoft blocks political terms from the titles of blogs published in their MSN spaces. HRW urges these companies to not let themselves be “used by governments as tools of political manipulation and in some cases abuse of fundamental human rights” (Richardson).

The Internet companies say that while they stand by people’s right to free expression, they also are obliged to follow local rules and regulations no matter which country they do business in. They also claim that providing Internet services in China with some content censored, is still benefitting people more than if they were not present there at all [4]. HRW believes that there has been, over all, very little effort on the part of these companies to resist demands for censorship. They want the Internet companies to comply only if demands for censorship are made through valid legally binding procedures that can be documented, and when all other avenues to resist it have been exhausted.

HRW claims that the issue is of active compliance. These companies, by actively censoring content which is sensitive in China, are acting unethically. By active censoring they mean cases where when one searches for a term and doesn’t get back any links to the web-sites (whether the sites are banned or not), or there is inadequate documentation that some censorship has happened. Google created their own censoring mechanisms based on their own testing of what the Chinese ISP’s were blocking [5]. The report intends to warn against possible complicity in cases where human rights violations can occur. It suggests that these companies can function in China while still doing so ethically. It suggests a number of things the companies can do, including among others [6], 

• o Not censoring content unless required by written, legally binding regulations.
• o Providing relevant information to the users whenever content is censored.
• o Developing and following an industry standard code of conduct restricting participation in activities violating the right to free expression

[1] “Race to the Bottom – Corporate Complicity in Chinese Internet Censorship”, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2006/china0806/

[2] Sophie Richardson, Deputy Director of Asia Division, Human Rights Watch, in an audio commentary posted on the Human Rights Watch website (http://www.hrw.org/).

[3] For more information on Dongzhou, see, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongzhou_protests_of_2005.

[4] Danny Sullivan, “Google Created EvilRank Scale To Decide On Chinese Censorship,” Search Engine Watch, January 30, 2006 [online], http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060130-154414.

[5] “Race to the Bottom”, Section IV. (3) Active censorship with Google.cn.

[6] “Race to the Bottom”, Section VI. Recommendations.