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US Int'l Telecom Advisory Committee

"Since its founding in 1949, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has exerted great effort in manipulating the flow of information and prohibiting the dissemination of viewpoints that criticize the government or stray from the official Communist party view. The introduction of Internet technology in the mid-1990’s presented a challenge to government control over news sources, and by extension, over public opinion. While the Internet has developed rapidly, broadened access to news, and facilitated mass communications in China, many forms of expression online, as in other mass media, are still significantly stifled.

"Empirical studies have found that China has one of the most sophisticated content-filtering Internet regimes in the world. The Chinese government employs increasingly sophisticated methods to limit content online, including a combination of legal regulation, surveillance, and punishment to promote self-censorship, as well as technical controls. U.S. government efforts to defeat Internet “jamming” include funding through the Broadcasting Board of Governors to provide counter-censorship software to Chinese Internet users to access Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA) in China.

"As U.S. investments in China and bilateral trade have surged in the past several years and China has developed its communications infrastructure, Chinese society has undergone rapid changes while the PRC government has continued to repress political dissent. Many U.S. observers, including government officials, have argued that economic openness and the growth of the Internet in China would help bring about political liberalization in China. However, contrary to facilitating freedom, some private U.S. companies have been charged with aiding or complying with Chinese Internet censorship. Private U.S. companies that provide Internet hardware, such as routers, as well as those that provide Internet services such as Web-log (blog) hosting or search portals, have been accused of ignoring international standards for freedom of expression when pursuing business opportunities in the PRC market.

"In the 108th Congress, the provisions of the “Global Internet Freedom Act” (H.R. 48) were subsumed into the Foreign Relations Authorization Act of 2004-05 (H.R. 1950) and passed by the House on July 16, 2003. Christopher Cox reintroduced the bill (H.R. 2216) to the 109th Congress in May 2005. If passed, the act would authorize $50 million for FY2006 and FY2007 to develop and implement a global Internet freedom policy. The act would also establish an office within the International Broadcasting Bureau with the sole mission of countering Internet jamming by repressive governments. On February 1, 2006, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus held a hearing entitled, “Human Rights and the Internet — The People’s Republic of China.” On February 15, 2006, the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations of the House International Relations Committee will hold a joint hearing with the Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific regarding the Internet and censorship in China."

- CRS Report to Congress, Internet Development and Information Control in the People's Republic of China, Executive Summary (Feb 2006) PDF

Google v China January 2010

Sec. of State Hillary Clinton,
Internet Freedom (Jan. 22, 2010)
  • See also Google :: First Amendment
  • In January 2010 Google announced that it would cease doing business in China on the grounds that Google had been the victim of cyberattacks that originated out of China. Some of these attacks on Google were targeted at the accounts of Chinese human rights workers. Reports indicate that these cyberattacks targeted many US companies, however, Google is the only company that responded in this way. The website www.google.cn reportedly stopped filtering its content and google.cn could be used to get access about the Dalai Lama, Tiananmen Square, and Chinese religious movements. Officially Google states that they have not started to not-filter google.cn but may do so in the near future unless these issues are resolved. Google did upgrade some of its web based applications, such as Gmail, to the more secure HTTPS protocol.
    • Dec. 2009 Google subject to sophisticated attack on infrastructure. Much more sophisticated than usual. It resulted in theft of IP from Google. Approximately 20 other countries were the target of this attack. Google was given reason to believe that the target of the attack were gmail accounts of human rights activists. Google also discovered compromised gmail accounts of people who are affiliated with human rights work.
  • Sec. of State Hilary Clinton gave a speach on Jan. 21 on free speach and the Internet which reference the issues Google has experience with China. Clinton referred to Chinese censorship as an "iron curtain" on the Internet.
    • In an Internet connected era, an attack on one nation's network is an attack on all nation's networks.
      • While this is a referense to WWII policy, it is also literally true that any attack affects all assets on the network.
  • China has responded by saying that China was the true victim of the cyberattacks. China responded to Clinton by saying that this is "information imperialism." A Chinese represented commented on Google by saying that everyone knowns that Google is simply a bastion of pornography.
  • Google went into China in approximately 2003. At that time there was a great public criticism of Google's cooperation with an authoritarian regime. This was in the context of other countries such as Yahoo! having problems with having turned over subscribers information which was then used to prosecute Chinese human rights workers. Google did get some consessions at that time; any time Google blocked a website pursuant to Chinese censorship rules, Google provided notice to the subscriber that the website had been blocked. This had not been done before. Other companies followed suit and began to provide notice of blocked content to users. It is reported that even the Chinese search engine adopted this policy.
  • Google's market in China has apparently not been large, and it is reportedly not the largest search engine in China. Google states that it did just complete its best quarter in China..
  • Google has received strong praise for its actions.

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