CHINA: Amnesty International took on the Great Firewall of China yesterday when the human rights group launched a campaign urging the world's top internet service providers - Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google - to stop kow-towing to the world's most stringent internet censor, the Chinese government.
The fastest-growing major internet market in the world, China has 700,000 portals and 111 million web users. However, Chinese officials consider cyberspace to be a hothouse of subversive thought and with the help of the world's biggest internet groups, it blocks content behind the Bamboo Firewall.
Amnesty wants users of Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google to e-mail the companies directly and use their online feedback forms to call for changes to the way they operate in China.
The companies should reveal which words they have banned from blogs or filtered out of web searches in China, Amnesty said, and make public all agreements with the Chinese authorities and their role in blocking content.
Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google should publicly call for the release of cyber-dissidents jailed for expressing peaceful opinions online, Amnesty said, and make sure to follow all legal routes possible before bowing down to demands that could harm human rights.
Beijing has recruited thousands of web watchdogs to watch over the capital's cybercafés and internet service providers.
Around 40,000 officials routinely monitor e-mail and websites in the world's most populous nation.
Amnesty accused the big internet companies of hypocrisy for talking about freedom of expression and access to information on the one hand but denying it in order to access the lucrative Chinese market.
"Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google have all facilitated or colluded in China's censorship of the net. They claim they are obeying local laws when in fact they are succumbing to political pressure," Amnesty International's UK director, Kate Allen, said.
"The argument that the companies are 'bringing the internet to China' is spurious: the internet has been in China for 10 years. These companies are simply trying to get a slice of a vast and growing market. And it's at a great cost: their activities are aiding and abetting government censorship rather than challenging it." There have been high-profile cases of censorship and journalists going to jail with what appeared to be the help of some of the top names on the internet.
Last year Yahoo! was accused of supplying data to China that was used as evidence to jail Shi Tao, news editor at the Contemporary Business News in Hunan province, for 10 years for leaking state secrets abroad, apparently using his Yahoo! e-mail account.
The blog of Michael Anti, an outspoken political blogger, was shut under government orders in December and internet writers have been jailed over the sensitive content of e-mails and postings.
Microsoft has admitted it responds to directions from the Chinese government in restricting users of MSN Spaces from using certain terms, while Google has launched a censored version of its international search engine in China.
Domestic giants such as Sohu and Baidu, along with China sites operated by Yahoo! and Microsoft, all routinely block searches on politically sensitive terms.