China: Website registration strengthens self-censorship

The OpenNet Initiative has released a new bulletin today, analyzing the impact of China’s non-commercial website registration regulations on website owners and bloggers, now that the regulations have been in effect for over half a year. The bulletin serves as one of several ongoing updates to ONI's 2005 China Internet filtering report.

The regulations, which were announced last March and took effect in early June of last year, require all non-commercial and personal websites as well as blogs that aren't hosted by a blog-hosting service to obtain a registration number from the authorities. Failure to register makes the site illegal and it can be shut down. (See my June 12, 2005 blog post on the subject here.) As the famed Chinese blogger Isaac Mao explained at the time, bloggers who set up blogs on his hosted service, Blogbus.com, or on rival Bokee.com or MSN Spaces (or one of the many other blog-hosting services) don't have to register because the hosting services have already registered on their behalf. In exchange for this convenience, the blog-hosting services agree to censor and sometimes even delete the blogs of their users. In other words, the government outsources censorship to private business, who censor in a way that's more convenient and a bit more user-friendly than the government's methods. The companies are of course required to do this in exchange for the license to operate their blog-hosting businesses.

So in other words, as a Chinese blogger if you want to stay out of trouble and have a blog that won't be blocked from view inside China, you now have two options: 1. If you're geeky enough, set up your own blog on your own server space, then go through the bureaucratic trouble of getting it registered, giving your real name and address to the authorities, who now know where you live, thus giving you a strong incentive to censor yourself; or, 2. Set up a blog on MSN Spaces, Blogbus, Bokee, Sina or one of the other blog-hosting services, who provide the value-added service of knowing what will get you in trouble better than you probably do, and thus saving you the burden of self-censoring because they'll do it for you. The risk of trusting them to protect you from yourself is of course that one day your blog might simply disappear. 

The bulletin concludes:

Overall, ONI believes that the new registration requirement has two key effects that bolster Internet control in China. First, it operates to place Chinese Web site owners on notice that the state is monitoring, and seeks to link them to, Internet content. As blogger Isaac Mao states, registration thus seeks to deter bloggers from posting sensitive materials on their blogs by creating fear about the consequences for so doing.(51) Thus, the state likely seeks to promote blogging as a communications method, but to ensure it operates in a more controlled way.(52) Second, this requirement is another layer in China's multi-modal system of controls over Internet access and content.(53) By creating additional barriers to creating material on-line, and to making it available to the public, the state creates some deterrence and leads Web site owners and bloggers to self-censor what they post. Overall, then, while the new Web site registration requirement is not a major hurdle in itself, it functions as another gear in the sophisticated, widespread, and powerful machinery of state control over the Internet in China.

I gave a talk at Pop!Tech last October about how censorship is being built into Chinese internet business. My notes and powerpoint presentation from the talk are here. You can listen to the whole thing at ITConversations here.