Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : IMOT, the Yahoo of China?? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Xenogenetic who wrote (157)	3/4/1999 3:45:00 PM
From: kathyh	Respond to of 781

Hi Adam, I'm not sure either...the most recent info I have on that is from a year old article, posted earlier, from Time magazine, I'm pasting in an excerpt, but I don't know what the outcome of the question is, how involved the gov't will be in policing... Maybe it isn't so important if Yahoo IS in China, because I think that although the PR referred to the "Yahoo of China", IMOT will be unique in its development of the largest Chinese business Database and their Chinese language search engine. I have a call into Steve in IR to clear this up and will report back, or better yet, would love to hear another's take on this, have you tried calling him?? Thanks for the great questions, wish I had all the answers, but I don't!!! PR: go2net.newsalert.com Excerpt from Time: >>>>>>But there¹s a catch: China still may try to build the electronic equivalent of the Great Wall around the country. Citizens would have easy access to domestic Websites but sites outside the mainland‹cnn.com, for instance‹might be blocked. China would become one big, self-contained Internet‹what techies like to call an Intranet‹sealed off from the rest of the world. Access to foreign sites would remain under government control. Says a Hong Kong engineer who has worked with China on high-level info policy for two decades: ³The Chinese worry about the Net. Will it just be an inundation of Western content, or will it reflect Chinese culture? China has every right to find a balance between local and foreign content.² That¹s a balance the most nimble Chinese gymnast would find tough to maintain. The Net, after all, is fundamentally about openness. And if the idea of the Web is to make Chinese firms more competitive, that means letting them have access to everything from DuPont¹s chemicals Website to the U.S. Patent Office¹s listing of new inventions. For that reason, some Chinese think the government will drop all its talk about an Intranet and throw open the doors. Says a 24-year-old engineer at Sparkice: ³Walk into any Chinese company with Net access and look at the hard drives, look at the bookmarks in the browsers. It¹s all U.S. content.² Even the most vigorous Net-proponents argue for a bit of patience. ³Some control is needed at this point because otherwise China would go wild,² says UTStarcom¹s Lu. ³If you just jump too fast, it¹s not good.² In an early attempt at a Net policy, the government in 1996 banned access to a range of sites, from playboy.com to time.com, in order to help combat ³spiritual pollution.² But an afternoon¹s surfing in Beijing shows the government fire walls that block access to these sites work only with limited success. While cnn.com is resolutely blocked, other Western news-focused sites are occasionally accessible because of software glitches on the black-out servers. And most Chinese with Net access are smart enough to find what they want even in the face of a watchful, nervous government. One group of university students in Tibet fired up a browser in front of a reporter recently and pointed the program at the most controversial site they could imagine: Bill Clinton¹s own www.whitehouse.gov. The opening screen, ³Good evening from the White House,² came up with no problem at all. The job of policing the net falls to a rapidly growing team of full-time surfers inside the Public Security Bureau (psb). Says an engineer who has seen the room in Beijing where the work goes on: ³It¹s something of a joke. Here you have all these bureaucrats sitting around looking at dirty pictures all day. They know they can¹t control it. There are too many sites. They just want to stop the most high-profile sites for form¹s sake.² Lin Quan, secretary-general of the State Science and Technology Commission, told a conference this year that official censorship would not be allowed to stop the growth of Net use. Instead, the government, like those in other countries, primarily wants to protect public morality. <<<<<<<<