China: Web censorship gives US pause for thought

After hearing reports that US tech giants such as Microsoft and Yahoo! are abiding by Chinese law mandating internet censorship, some irritated US politicians are threatening to pass laws restricting such co-operation.

Representative Christopher Smith, a New Jersey Republican, said on Thursday that the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Human Rights, which he heads, will hold a hearing in early to mid- February. Smith has invited representatives from Cisco Systems, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, the international watchdog group Reporters Without Borders and the US State Department to speak.

The effort is designed to determine what can be done, either by legislative mandate or on a voluntary basis, to "dissociate a company from working hand-in-glove with a dictatorship", said Smith.

A similar hearing is planned for 1 February in the Congressional Human Rights Caucus said Ryan Keating, communications director for Representative Tim Ryan, the Ohio Democrat leading the parallel effort. The caucus, unlike the human rights subcommittee, is an "informal" committee that is overseen by about 30 House members and includes a few hundred others, Smith among them, as supporting members.

Both Ryan and Smith are in the process of concocting new laws, which are likely to take cues from recommendations issued by Reporters Without Borders and the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (SRC), a 12-member, congressionally selected governmental panel.

Paris-based Reporters Without Borders this week backed a law banning a US company from hosting an email server in any "repressive" country. It's also suggested US corporations come up with a joint plan for how to handle censorship requests from foreign governments, including refusal to censor terms such as "democracy" and "human rights".

The companies have defended their decisions by saying that, as multinational corporations, they had no choice but to comply with Chinese mandates.

A Google representative said: "We are mindful that governments wherever we do business around the world impose restrictions on access to information and of course we are obliged by law to follow them."

The representative added that Google is a relatively new entrant to China and values user interests and access to information. "The experience for users in China searching on Google.com has not been changed by Google in any way," she said.

Cisco has been accused of building technology that allows Chinese officials to filter sites. John Earnhardt, the company's senior manager for policy communications, said: "Our routers have embedded technology in them that allows network administrators to manage their networks", acknowledging that "this technology can be used to block access to sites they don't want users to access". But the same features are present in routers regardless of the country in which they are sold, he noted.

According to the China security review commission, China operates one of the world's most sophisticated net filtration systems, targeting comments viewed as threats to the Chinese Communist Party's tenets while letting anti-US and anti-democracy sites stand. The country's web-using contingent has grown exponentially, reaching 103 million in June 2005. It also offers the world's second-largest internet market.

Meanwhile, the SRC said in its 2005 annual report to Congress: "US companies continue to play an active role in China's internet censorship, providing hardware, software and content filtering services. While these interactions between US corporations and China's government may be legitimate commercial decisions, in sum they had the effect of helping to build and legitimise the government's media censorship efforts."

Last week, Microsoft admitted to removing a blog from its MSN Spaces service that was kept by a Chinese journalist who allegedly voiced anti-government sentiments. The company has also been accused of blocking words such as "democracy" and "freedom" on its MSN site.

In September, Reporters Without Borders blamed Yahoo! for handing Chinese officials a personal email message linked to Chinese journalist Shi Tao's account that contained what the government considered a "state secret". Tao was ultimately convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Reporters Without Borders has also accused Google of blocking news items - that have garnered government disapproval - from its Google News China site. A company representative denied such activity on Thursday.

Representative Smith, who has conducted 25 hearings about Chinese human rights issues since taking office in 1981, said: "There is no democracy in Beijing - it's not a democracy, and they have a very, very poor human rights record on a myriad of fronts. I think you have to ask the question: is this money worth it? At what cost? People going to prison for 10 years... that to me, that's just not worth it."

But not everybody agrees with Smith's proposal for new laws.

Sonia Arrison, director of technology studies at the free-market Pacific Research Institute, said: "If Yahoo! isn't doing business in China, someone else will. It's putting American businesses at a disadvantage in the world marketplace." Arrison suggested that instead US companies join together to present a unified front to the Chinese government.

Neither Microsoft nor Yahoo! responded to a request for comment.

Declan McCullagh writes for CNET News.com