U.S. Protests Chinese Computer Censorship Regulations
- By Beth Sommer
- Published Thursday 2nd 2009
Beth Sommer
Beth Sommer is part of the LIGATT Security "Cyber Security Team." here daily duties including researching cyber threats and tracking hackers through Cyber Space.
By Mark Drajem
June 24 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk asked Chinese officials to revoke a requirement for Web- filtering software on all new personal computers, saying it may violate World Trade Organization rules.
Kirk and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke cited the requirement that computer makers include “Green Dam-Youth Escort” software by July 1 to filter out pornography as a possible violation of WTO rules, in a joint letter they wrote yesterday.
“Mandating technically flawed Green Dam software and denying manufacturers and consumers freedom to select filtering software is an unnecessary and unjustified means to achieve that objective, and poses a serious barrier to trade,” Kirk said in a statement today.
Kirk and Locke wrote their letter to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce and to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The U.S. is pursuing a complaint raised by representatives of technology companies including Google Inc. and Oracle Corp., who have said those censorship regulations amount to an unfair barrier to trade.
Wang Lijian, spokesman for the industry ministry, said he couldn’t immediately comment when reached by Bloomberg News.
China has said it wants personal computer makers to include the software for computers sold in the country. The program also blocks anti-government sites and will impair computer performance by making machines more prone to security breaches, according to a June 12 report by OpenNet Initiative, which includes researchers at the University of Cambridge, University of Oxford and University of Toronto.
Officials of the State Department, U.S. Trade Representative and Commerce Department based at the embassy in Beijing have already met with Chinese officials to discuss the software dispute, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters in Washington on June 22. In addition to filtering out illicit content, the software has “broader filtering implications,” he said.
A group of 19 business associations in North America and Japan, including groups representing Microsoft Corp., Dell Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc., last week sent a letter to China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology seeking a review of the agency’s May 19 order to adopt the software.
To contact the reporter on this story: Mark Drajem in Washington at mdrajem@bloomberg.net;
Last Updated: June 24, 2009 23:45 EDT
