China orders Google to block websites

THE Chinese government will force the world's biggest technology company Google to block a raft of overseas sites on its search engine.

This is China's third major internet censorship move in a month amid growing internet activism in the country and in the shadow of a strong online element in the disputed election in Iran.

The attack on Google was issued under a "pornography" crackdown and comes only two weeks after the government surprised its media and technology sector by introducing the "Green Dam Youth Escort" filtering software onto every new computer sold after July 1.

It also came only a month after a range of international sites, including Microsoft Hotmail and micro-blogging site Twitter, were blocked ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

"Google China has not conducted the oversight required according to China's laws and regulations, and a large volume of foreign internet pornographic information has entered our borders through this website," said Internet Illegal Information Reporting Centre, the government-run online watchdog, last week.

The following day it forced the company to disable the drop down menu, which helps guess search topics, and promised it would make the group block access to myriad sites.

"The internet is the only media where people can express themselves, given all other forms of media under control of all levels of governments," Hu Xingdou, Professor at Beijing Institute of Technology told Media.

"Restrictions on the internet is a setback in history, people's freedom of expression shouldn't be suppressed in the name of erasing pornography and violence online," he said.

Google, China's second most popular search engine after local outfit Baidu, has had an increasingly uneasy alliance with the government since it agreed to some censorship in return for unfettered market access.

This move was widely criticised by human rights activists as putting commercial interests ahead of ethical concerns. Google famously has as an informal company motto: "Don't be evil."

After mulling what to do about the Chinese market, Google decided that it would enter the market in early 2006.

"We concluded that although we weren't wild about the restrictions, it was even worse to not try to serve those users at all," Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said at the World Economic Forum in Davos in February 2006.

"We actually did an evil scale and decided not to serve at all was worse evil," he said, referring to the motto.

Last week, the Chinese government also issued guidelines to the country's media about how the unrest in Tehran should be covered following the disputed strong electron win of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The government underscored its sensitivity to the use of the internet for dissent when it blocked a raft of sites ahead of the Tiananmen anniversary. It also regularly shut downs blogs and chat rooms that it deems to be unsuitable; thousands of sites are reported to have been shut down already this year.

China's "netizens" use blogs and chat rooms to organise on an issue-by-issue basis. And nearly 600 million Chinese use mobile phones, many with internet access.

People power on the internet is playing a growing role in China where the corruption of local officials has emerged as the major political issue.

The internet played a big role in freeing a 21-year-old Chinese waitress last week who stabbed to death a local official who tried to rape her. She was effectively handed a suspended sentence after a public outcry that saw 23,000 chat rooms across the internet dedicated to her case.

"There's an invisible hand trying to castrate the internet; maybe it's the last tactic they can apply if they can't cut off the internet or abolish the Constitution," activist Beijing lawyer Lan Zhixue said. "But it's like drinking poison to quench your thirst. The flow of history won't go backwards, or move according to their will."