China To Cut Off Youtube.com and Myspace.com
2008-01-05
While the statute could limit online video to state-controlled media sites and ban foreign-owned video-hosting sites like YouTube and MySpace, it may also go unenforced, serving more as a threat to coerce video-hosting sites to police themselves. Rather than banning sites like YouTube altogether, says Ben Edelman, a professor at Harvard Business School and an Internet filtering researcher, Beijing's new rules may be "a shot across the bow."
Because the government lacks the technology to filter video as selectively as it filters text, Edelman says, it may hope to scare sites into censoring the content that the government wants banned. That digital contraband would include politically sensitive messages about racial minorities and human rights as well as sexual images. "Would the government actually block all video sites, save for registered sites, in one fell swoop?" he asks. "Maybe not. Their goals are just as well served by the threat."
MySpace China, a Chinese-language version of the News Corp. social networking site, already practices some degree of self-censorship. The site has been criticized by bloggers for demanding that users report one another when they spot posts with objectionable political content. Its terms of service prohibit members from discussions that would "leak state secrets or undermine the government," or "spread rumors and disturb the social order." MySpace China, however, hosts no video. Neither MySpace China nor its U.S.-based counterpart could be reached for comment. It remains to be seen whether the original MySpace, one of the most popular U.S. video sites, would follow MySpace China's self-censorship model to obey the Chinese government's new rule.
Would YouTube, which is owned by Google be willing to censor content to comply with tightened Chinese regulations? "We obey local laws wherever we have local sites," says YouTube spokesperson Ricardo Reyes. In fact, YouTube does host a Hong Kong site, which would fall under Chinese law. But its terms of service do not contain the political prohibitions included in MySpace China's terms of service.
If foreign video sites are forced to cooperate with a repressive regime rather than lose their Chinese audience, they could face the same public relations disasters as other tech companies that have ventured into China. Google, for instance, was pilloried by human rights groups for censoring search results on its Chinese site in January 2006. And last October, after Yahoo! handed e-mail information over to the Chinese government that helped jail a dissident journalist, the company's chief executive was denounced as a "moral pygmy" in front of a U.S. congressional subcommittee and forced to apologize publicly to the journalist's mother.
But whether the new regulations are actually a tacit order to censor content is still unclear. John Palfrey, a Harvard Law professor and researcher at the Open Net Initiative, worries that video sites without government ties could be wiped out altogether in preparation for the public relations battles surrounding the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. "This could be bad news for free speech and bad news for economic development," says Palfrey. "And it could make it very hard for Web 2.0 businesses to compete in China."
In fact, no one outside of the Chinese government--least of all the affected sites themselves--knows to what degree the tightened regulations will be enforced or how complicated it will be for video sites to get government permits. A statement from YouTube expresses, above all, bewilderment. "China's new regulations for online video could be a cause for concern, depending on the interpretation," it reads. "Like other companies, we are studying the new rules."
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