(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has deplored what it deems the “irresponsible” policies of major United States (US) Internet firms Yahoo! and Google in bowing to Chinese government demands for censorship and called for a code of conduct to be imposed. Yahoo! has been censoring its Chinese language search engine for several years and rival firm Google, […]
(RSF/IFEX) – RSF has deplored what it deems the “irresponsible” policies of major United States (US) Internet firms Yahoo! and Google in bowing to Chinese government demands for censorship and called for a code of conduct to be imposed.
Yahoo! has been censoring its Chinese language search engine for several years and rival firm Google, which recently took a share in Baidu, a Chinese search engine that filters a user’s findings, seems poised to go the same route. In their efforts to conquer the Chinese market, the two firms are “making compromises that directly threaten freedom of expression,” RSF said.
“The US government is supposed to be at the forefront of the fight for online freedom, especially since the passage of the Global Internet Freedom Act,” the organisation noted in letters to two top US officials. “Yet it places no restrictions on private sector activity even when firms work with some of the world’s most repressive regimes. We condemn this hypocrisy and demand that companies such as Yahoo! and Google drop their irresponsible policies and pledge to respect freedom of information, including abroad.”
In December 2003, RSF wrote to Yahoo! chair and chief executive officer Terry Semel asking him to respect the rights of China’s Internet users but received no reply. The organisation has now written to Lorne Crane, US assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labour, and Earl Anthony Wayne, assistant secretary of state for economic and business affairs, urging them to establish a code of conduct for US Internet firms selling products abroad.
Several years ago, Yahoo! launched a Chinese version (http://cn.yahoo.com) of its Internet portal and in late June 2004 announced a new Chinese search engine called Yisou. Yahoo! China and Yisou censor search results as directed by the government.
Some combined keyword searches, such as “Free Tibet,” do not display any results. For others, only official sites appear. The top results of a search for “Falun Gong” produced only sites critical of the Chinese spiritual movement, in line with the regime’s position. The same search, using a non-censored search engine, turned up material supporting Falun Gong and detailing the government’s repression of its followers.
Google has so far refused to censor its search engine, a move which resulted in access to it being blocked by the Chinese authorities for one week in September 2002. Authorities are currently obliged to filter search results themselves, which is both more difficult and less effective.
Google now appears to have changed tactics. In June 2004, it acquired a substantial share in one of China’s biggest search engines, Baidu, which carefully filters out all “subversive” content. When Google was blocked in 2002, Chinese Internet users were redirected to http://www.baidu.com. A search on Baidu for “Huang Qi”, a cyber-dissident imprisoned for posting articles critical of the government online, produced “This document contains no data,” even though hundreds of articles in Chinese have been posted about him. A search for “independence Taiwan” returned only sites critical of the island’s government, while Google’s Chinese version, http://www.google.com/intl/zh-CN, which is not censored, returned pro-Taiwan sites as well.
The issue of search engine censoring is at the core of the free expression debate. The latest survey by the official China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) says 80 per cent of Chinese Internet users get online data by using search engines. Access to some, such as Altavista, has already been blocked inside China.
Other US firms would also be directly concerned by a code of ethics. Cisco Systems, for example, has sold several thousand routers, costing more than 16,000 euros (approx.US$19,300) each to enable the regime to build an online spying system, and the firm’s engineers have helped programme it to spot “subversive” keywords in messages. The system also enables police to know who has looked at banned sites or sent “dangerous” e-mails.
The Global Internet Freedom Act, introduced in the US Congress by Republican Christopher Cox and passed by the House of Representatives in July 2003, aims to combat online censorship imposed by repressive regimes such as China, Burma, Syria, Cuba and Saudi Arabia.
For more information on Internet censorship in China, read RSF’s “The Internet under Surveillance” 2004 report, available online at http://www.internet.rsf.org.
A total of 61 Internet users are currently in prison in China for posting online criticism of their government.
