Human Rights Watch recently published a report on Internet Censorship in China. The report gives details about how corporations like Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, and Skype are cooperating with the Chinese government censorship efforts. It also gives some good background on the “Great Firewall of China,” which refers to the way in which the Chinese government controls the movement of information on the internet both going in and coming out of the country.
Since we should expect the Hub to be blocked in China, we should probably read up on the subject.
Recommendations from HRW:
To activists, human rights groups, nongovernmental organizations, charitable foundations, and other groups concerned with promoting global freedom of speech online
* Work in concert with socially responsible businesses to develop technologies that will maximize privacy, ensure anonymity, and enable Internet users around the globe to circumvent Internet censorship, filtering, and blocking.
* Conduct independent research and documentation of the ways in which companies are or are not complying with legislation and/or codes of conduct.
* Provide clearing houses of information through which users can better inform themselves about the ways in which the products and services they use may be limiting their universally recognized right to free speech and privacy.
Link to the full HRW report.
Link to a PDF of the HRW report.
The Internet Censorship Explorer (ICE) gives a good summary as well additional information and analysis:
Human Rights Watch has released a report on Internet censorship. It particularly focuses on the role U.S. corporations in censorsing their products in order to enter the Chinese market. The report’s title, “Race to the Bottom”, sums up the situation quite well.