According to a new report on CNN.com, the Chinese government has passed a law requiring all new computers sold in China to include software to block so-called “harmful” web sites and content. The new law will go into effect on the second of July, and the blocking software is allegedly aimed at limiting access to pornographic web sites.
But web analysts are skeptical about the intentions of the new blocking software. Some believe it will also be used to limit freedom of speech as it pertains to political or religious content. The blocking program, known as the “Green Dam,” is the product of the Jinhui Computer Engineering Co., a Chinese software company that is also reportedly involved in projects with the Chinese military and intelligence services.
Some believe that the Chinese firewall, which already blocks access to many Western web sites and filters search results from Google and Yahoo, is not enough to prevent Chinese citizens from accessing so-called “harmful” content online. By using proxy servers and other IP address switching software, many Chinese citizens are able to “work around” China’s Web firewall. Some skeptics of the Chinese government believe this could be a primary reason for requiring all new computers to have a “Green Dam.”
Western companies such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM are already gearing up to comply with the new Chinese law, and are either pre-installing the required software, or providing it along with the computer on a separate disk.
Like Google, Yahoo, and many Western companies before them, Hewlett-Packard and the other big Western computer manufacturers have buckled under to pressure by the Chinese government, and are effectively complicit in limiting the free flow of information — and even free speech itself — within the Chinese mainland. It would seem that the enormous profit potential inherent in a billion plus Chinese consumers causes all notions of a freedom and democracy to go right out the window…
Of course, China is not the only nation to limit its citizen’s access to the Web. Iran, North Korea, Syria and Lebanon all have severe Internet restrictions, limiting access to many sites. Even Asian nations like Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines routinely block IP addresses within their borders, though in these countries it is primarily limited to pornographic web sites.
But so far China is the only nation to require new computers to be delivered with blocking software, and many analysts worried that it is a dangerous trend that could spread to other countries with less than stellar records regarding Web openness and free speech.
