Originally published February 19 2006
United States may pass laws restricting U.S. companies from cooperation with Chinese censorship
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Representative Christopher Smith (R-NJ) has promised to hold a hearing that may eventually lead to a restriction on corporate cooperation with Chinese web censorship.
Representative Christopher Smith, a New Jersey Republican, said on Thursday that the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Human Rights, which he heads, will hold a hearing in early to mid- February.
Smith has invited representatives from Cisco Systems, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, the international watchdog group Reporters Without Borders and the US State Department to speak.
Paris-based Reporters Without Borders this week backed a law banning a US company from hosting an email server in any "repressive" country.
It's also suggested US corporations come up with a joint plan for how to handle censorship requests from foreign governments, including refusal to censor terms such as "democracy" and "human rights".
The companies have defended their decisions by saying that, as multinational corporations, they had no choice but to comply with Chinese mandates.
The representative added that Google is a relatively new entrant to China and values user interests and access to information.
"The experience for users in China searching on Google.com has not been changed by Google in any way," she said.
John Earnhardt, the company's senior manager for policy communications, said: "Our routers have embedded technology in them that allows network administrators to manage their networks", acknowledging that "this technology can be used to block access to sites they don't want users to access".
The country's web-using contingent has grown exponentially, reaching 103 million in June 2005.
While these interactions between US corporations and China's government may be legitimate commercial decisions, in sum they had the effect of helping to build and legitimise the government's media censorship efforts."
Last week, Microsoft admitted to removing a blog from its MSN Spaces service that was kept by a Chinese journalist who allegedly voiced anti-government sentiments.
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