Global Online Freedom Act of 2006

A brief article on CNET News.com explains the difficulties of a truly global economy. US companies are facing restrictions as to what the content of their websites can contain…and feeling the strong reaction to their complicity at home. Here are a few views of the issues:

February 17, 2006
Time to Export Your China-Based Website
Entrepreneur.com
Posted by Teresa Ciulla @ 02:54 PM

“According to proposed legislation that's scheduled to be introduced shortly in Congress, nearly every U.S. company with a website located in China will have to move it elsewhere or its executives could face prison terms of up to a year… The bill, currently titled the Global Online Freedom Act of 2006, was drafted by Rep. Christopher Smith (NJ-R) in response to recent
reports of censorship in China by some of the major internet players, including Yahoo!, Google, Cisco and Microsoft. If passed by Congress, the CNET article says the bill "would dramatically change the business practices of corporations with operations in China, Iran, Vietnam and other nations deemed to be overly 'Internet-restricting.' "

January 26,2006
Google Praised, Chided for Sanitized Site
www.salon.com
By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN Associated Press Writer SHANGHAI, China

“For Internet companies doing business in China, a piece of a booming market has not come without compromises. A series of episodes showing that the companies were bending to the restrictive demands of Beijing -- filtering words like ''democracy'' or ''human rights'' from Chinese versions of a blog product,...”

Wed Feb 15, 2006
Congress grills Internet execs on China policies Reuters.com
By Joel Rothstein and Paul Eckert

“U.S. lawmakers lashed out at Google Inc. and other prominent Internet companies on Wednesday, with one Democrat questioning "how your corporate leadership sleeps at night" because of the companies' alleged complicity in human rights abuses by the Chinese government.”

2006-03-01
Internet management in line with world norms
China Daily
By Li Hong

“Web executives and sector experts at the seminar said that keeping out "illegal and harmful" information from the Internet is a common practice worldwide. "China's overseeing Internet content is in tandem with world norms. Many big websites in the world have explicit written rules on deleting or editing netizens' messages that they deem abusive, defamatory, offensive, obscene, or in violation of a specific law," said Professor Ming Dahong, of the Journalism Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.”

Wednesday, 15 February 2006
China defends internet regulation
BBC News: Asia-Pacific

“Government official Liu Zhengrong said western criticism of China's internet censorship smacked of double standards. He also said no one had been arrested just for writing online content. According to a BBC correspondent in Beijing, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, these assertions contrast sharply with a number of recent cases. Several people are reported to have been jailed in recent years for posting information on the internet deemed subversive. Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist, was last year jailed for 10 years for sending foreign-based websites the text of an internal Communist Party message.”