OT: Censors losing bid to control Web flow
technology.scmp.com
STAFF REPORTER
Beijing wants to control the information flow on the Internet, but
policing it is increasingly unrealistic as online usage becomes
more common and sophisticated, according to Duncan Clark,
managing director of BDA China.
Mr Clark said self-censorship was the most effective way to
control information.
He said China used conventional intimidation strategies like
arbitrary arrests to scare Internet users.
"It recently arrested a person for downloading and printing
information from the Internet.
"That works, as people are becoming more careful in what they are
doing."
But otherwise, he said, control and censorship were on the way
out.
"Singapore has already given up," he said.
It now only acted when it stumbled on serious matters, such as
child pornography.
Although legal restraints on the Internet in China mainly dated from
last year, they would lose their effectiveness quickly because they
were "complicated, contradictory and changing all the time".
China's myriad Internet restraints limit themselves to Chinese Web
sites. But how to establish the nationality of a Web site?
A lawyer at China's Ministry of Information Industry said: "We have
never dealt with a case up to now, but from foreign cases I would
say that the location of the server would indicate under what
jurisdiction the Web site falls."
That is one of the reasons large numbers of Chinese Web sites
are hosted in the United States and not in the mainland.
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It has long been my hope that modern technology such as the Internet and Direct Broadcast Satellite radio and television would break the hold of totalitarians on the hearts and minds of the people as their control of news and views from the outside is weakened. Of course they still have a big advantage in their control of the school curriculum which form the basic knowledge platform through which the people filter the news they get from the outside. And of course they still have control over the other forms of mass media, radio, television, newpapers etcetera, but a least some light can shine in through the cracks. |
