Beijing Seeks to Tighten Reins on Websites in China (original) (raw)
Technology|Beijing Seeks to Tighten Reins on Websites in China
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/30/technology/china-internet-censorship.html
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An Internet cafe in Beijing. It was not clear whether the draft law would apply to all websites or only to those hosted on servers in China.Credit...Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times
- March 29, 2016
HONG KONG — China’s government said on Monday that it would take steps to more strictly manage websites in the country, its latest push to set boundaries in the wider Internet.
A draft law posted by one of China’s technology regulators said that websites in the country would have to register domain names with local service providers and with the authorities.
It was not clear whether the rule would apply to all websites or only to those hosted on servers in China. Chinese laws can be haphazardly enforced and are usually vague, and because the new rule is only a draft, analysts said they expected the regulator, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, to specify later to whom the law would apply.
If the rule applies to all websites, it will have major implications and will effectively cut China out of the global Internet. By creating a domestic registry for websites, the rule would create a system of censorship in which only websites that have specifically registered with the Chinese government would be reachable from within the country.
Zhu Wei, deputy director of the Communications Law Research Center at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, said he believed that under the current wording, the law would block foreign websites not registered with China.
“I think the draft mostly tries to address Internet security and the large amount of pornographic websites and other websites that violate Chinese laws,” he said. “Most of those domains are registered abroad. It is not easy to tackle them.”
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