Friday, January 04, 2008

China: All Your Internet Video Sites Belong To Us

China has upped the ante on censorship, moving beyond the Great Firewall of China to mandate that all Internet video sites must be state-owned. Websites would then be required to follow the same censorship rules as television broadcasters and newspapers, which are already operated, and strictly regulated, by the state. The move is aimed at clearing up technical difficulties in regulating video on the Internet, an area that the Chinese government has sought to control but has been less effective at censoring than the standard Internet. However, plenty of ambiguities remain.

A number of domestic video sites are waiting to see if the government will take control of their private enterprises, and it's unknown how foreign sites like Google's YouTube will be affected. The regulations appear to be aimed at censorship rather than socializing a booming new industry, but the new rules could be the most effective way of impeding YouTube's dominance. What's more evil than Google? A Google partly controlled by the Chinese government.
What better way to control content and news than to control the very sites that host the information in the first place. If the Chinese government controls the video sites, videos that would prove to hurt the Communist government would be the first to disappear - as would the inalienable right to free speech for the Chinese people, which has been denied for far too long.

The Chinese government is preemptively moving to eliminate possible avenues for opposition.

This also will have an effect on foreign websites, including Google, which owns YouTube, but what happens remains to be seen.

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