Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
temporary bans on Internet cafés, placing of cameras and requesting
identification in Internet cafés (by more than five hundred Internet
caféwatchers in Beijing in 2006), closing of Web sites, limiting access to
and production of news sites and weblogs, blocking access to 'undesir-
able' Web sites, intimidating actual and potential users, restrictive poli-
cies towards Internet service providers and jailing Internet activists. 54
The Chinese government is even able to condition major international
Internet companies such as Yahoo, Microsoft, eBay, Skype and Google,
which all seem willing to accept all kind of restrictions in entering
this giant market. 55 In China, the combination of all these restric-
tions is often labelled 'the Great Fire Wall'. At the same time, in both
states, these restrictions are to a significant extent subverted and are
not always that effective. It seems that in China and Vietnam, the con-
trolled liberalisation of the Internet in the 1990s made place for a more
free development of the sector at the turn of the millennium, but is anno
2006 again the battle ground between liberalisation and state control.
Chinese and Vietnamese citizens and organisations employ various tac-
tics to gain and sustain freer access to the Internet (cf. Wilson, 2004 :
272), as they do with other restrictive policies. But major parts of the
Internet remain in state hands and state control continues to be in
place. China and Vietnam were also among the fifteen countries who
plead - in vain - for more state control on the Internet during the
November 2005 World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis,
54
See Sinclair, 2002 ;Wilson, 2004 ; Downing, 2005 ; hrw.org (Human Rights
Watch). The Chinese government was especially effective in hacking the
Internet activities and Web sites of Falun Gong in 1999. With that, the
government has been quite successful in to controling Falun Gong Internet
communications within its frontiers, but less so those coming from outside
mainland China. In 2006, several Internet activists were still in prison in both
countries (see the annual reports on both countries by Reporters sans
Frontieres at http://www.rsf.org/).
55
Yahoo cooperated with the Chinese authorities in 2005 to track down and
prosecute journalist Shi Tao (who was sentenced to ten years), and Google
accepted limiting the results from its search machine in China, for instance, in
order not to let Falun Gong, Taiwan, and Dalai Lama emerge in search results
(see the Web sites of Reporters sans Frontieres and Human Right Watch, for
more cases like these; see also Goldsmith and Wu, 2006 ). Early 2007,
Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and Vodafone were discussing with several NGOs
(including Human Right Watch and Reporters sans Frontieres) an Internet
code of conduct to protect free speech and privacy of Web users, following
these events and allegations.
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