【经济学人】China's internet censors：Dammed if you do

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China's internet censors
Dammed if you do
http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13917484

Jun 25th 2009  BEIJING


Illustration by Claudio Munoz

Protecting China’s innocents from smut, violence and the Dalai Lama

THE internet is full of stuff of which China’s government disapproves. Yet there are 300m Chinese internet-users. Keeping the two apart has embroiled the Chinese authorities in a long cat-and-mouse struggle. Service-providers and internet cafés are closely supervised, and a wide array of filtering mechanisms already overlays the national internet architecture. A fresh initiative goes one step further. From July 1st every personal computer sold in China will have to come with new filtering software called Green Dam Youth Escort.

It has yet to be decided whether Green Dam must be pre-loaded, or left on a disk for users to install. But it has sparked an uproar. Chinese internet users have vented online their spleen at being nannied. Hackers are reported to have mounted repeated attacks on the website of Green Dam’s developer. It has also received more than 1,000 harassing phone-calls, including death threats.

An American firm, Solid Oak Software, claims Green Dam includes stolen copyrighted code from one of its products, and has launched legal action. Computer makers are understandably reluctant to abet a massive censorship scheme, or to anger their customers with unwelcome software. Moreover, independent experts at the University of Michigan found Green Dam to be riddled with outdated code and security flaws that would leave computers at risk.

America’s Commerce Department this week lodged a formal complaint with the Chinese government, asking it to rescind the new rule. The government stresses Green Dam’s role in protecting young people from “unhealthy” and “poisonous” pornographic and violent content. But the Michigan experts found that it is also scans text for “politically sensitive” phrases.

Whether to do with Tibet, Taiwan, or Falun Gong, a spiritual sect, there are plenty of these, leading to sites deemed “harmful” by China. In a year of harder economic times and sensitive political anniversaries, the authorities are especially edgy. The thin and cautious reporting in the press of events in Iran suggests they are also nervous about access to news of political protest elsewhere.

Despite the opposition, however, which includes a grassroots attempt to organise an internet boycott in China on July 1st, the government remains undaunted, promising that technical flaws will be fixed and that Green Dam will go forward. It has also opened a second front, lashing out at Google for including a feature in its Chinese service that automatically completes search-query terms—it complains that this can lead users to sites containing pornography.

Google has long struggled to reconcile its corporate credo (“Don’t be evil”) with the onerous demands of China’s internet regulators. It has promised to renew its efforts to keep in line with Chinese standards. But the company also has fair cause to wonder why it has been singled out. Its main Chinese competitor, Baidu, is just as good at finding smut.

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