China's "Friends" highlights Web freedoms
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SONGJIANG NEW TOWN, China  - "Soul Partners," a  new comedy series described as China's version of the U.S. TV  hit "Friends," features six people in their 20s who live  together after being separately tricked into buying the same  apartment.
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The effect on YouTube and other sites isn't clear, but China says it will restrict broadcasting to state-owned or state-controlled providers.
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Google has approval to provide Internet content in China, potentially allowing it to offer news in the world's second-largest Internet market.
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China has decided to restrict the broadcasting of Internet videos to sites run by state-controlled companies and require providers to report questionable content to the government
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China is debating whether to relax control of the Internet during the Olympics, allowing access to banned websites such as the BBC, a spokeswoman for the organising committee said Tuesday.
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With 100 million Chinese using the Internet, the country's nascent blogosphere is a potent platform for do-gooders and for demagogues
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At a time when China's government has granted the foreign media greater freedom, it is tightening controls on Chinese who write about politically sensitive or embarrassing topics, human rights activists and journalists say.
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Wikipedia said the Chinese government is permitting access to most of the Chinese-language version of its online encyclopedia.
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China will allow only state-run Web sites to broadcast video or radio through the Internet, tightening the governmentâs regulatory grip over the media content offered there.
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(InfoWorld) - U.S. Congressman Chris Smith said that top American technology companies are failing to prevent censorship and other human rights abuses in China, writing Saturday in a letter to The Wall Street Journal. "There is enormous profit potential, but entering the Chinese market means challenging a repressive regime on basic human rights tenets. Sadly, some of America's largest tech firms are currently failing this new test of corporate responsibility," wrote Smith, a Republican from New Jersey and a member of the Foreign Services Committee. Smith said that representatives from Yahoo, Google, Cisco Systems, and Microsoft appeared at an April, 2006 Congressional hearing he convened and "they all acknowledged that their companies have enabled dictatorships to censor democracy and human rights promotion on the Internet." He also said that "Yahoo and Cisco have evenÂ helped the Chinese government incarcerate Internet usersÂ for pro-democracy activity." Court documents and evidence from human rights groups have shown that Yahoo's Hong Kong subsidiary, Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong), cooperated with Chinese police in cases against journalist Shi Tao and political activist Li Zhi, and that material provided by the company may have led to their conviction. Shi was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment, Li to eight years. In January, Smith re-introduced "The Global Online Freedom Bill of 2007," would give individuals like Shi and Li the right to seek redress in U.S. courts, if they believe their freedom of expression was compromised by a U.S. company. Internet companies would be required to inform the Office of Global Internet Freedom -- to be created if the bill is signed into law -- of keywords and search parameters they are filtering. They must also notify the Office of any restrictions on Internet information access with which they must comply in order to do business in a foreign country. Companies can be fined up to $2 million for violation of these principles, with individuals liable for up to $100,000. The bill provides for $50 million to establish the Office of Global Internet Freedom. The bill cited nine countries, including China, Iran, and North Korea, for blocking, restricting, and monitoring the Internet and its citizens' use of it, according to a January 8 statement from Smith's office. Later in January, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and Vodafone Group agreed to develop aÂ code of conductÂ with a coalition of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to promote freedom of expression and privacy rights. The parties involved said that they would develop a framework that would hold signatories accountable for their actions in the areas of freedom of expression and privacy rights. Eighteen NGOs are participating in the guidelines' development, including: Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School; Business for Social Responsibility; Electronic Frontier Foundation; Human Rights Watch; and Reporters Without Borders. One observer felt the tech firms were now between a rock and a hard place. "Technology companies now have the unenviable position of moving into the media realm, which is tightly controlled in China," said Danny Levinson, publisher of BDL Media's ChinaCSR.com and the China CSR monthly magazine. "When dealing with corporate social responsibility in China, foreign technology companies are easier targets than firms in other sectors because they are much more high profile than, say, the mining companies providing poor labor oversight and textile companies polluting the environment," Levinson said.
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China's Web viewers can no longer access YouTube, but Blogspot.com and Flickr photos are now available.
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The country's netizens have become experts at wielding the power of the web to settle personal squabbles. This time, they took on a major tech company--and won
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'The end of anonymous blogging' Microsoft and Yahoo! have signed a pact with the Chinese government that "encourages" the big name web players to record the identities of bloggers and censor content. So says Reporters Without Borders, an organization that fights for journalistic rights across the globe.â¦
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'You will use Baidu' It looks like China is hijacking web traffic from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!.â¦
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China has allowed access to Internet  versions of two of Taiwan's top daily newspapers after blocking  them for years for fear they would spread anti-Communist  propaganda, a Taiwan official said on Monday.
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China, which jails more journalists than any other nation, is challenging the view that information on the Internet is impossible to control, and the implications for press freedom could be far-reaching, a New York-based rights group said.
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Any day now China will have more web users than the US, but the net has been tamed by Beijing's iron grip