Word: censorship
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...series of sensitive anniversaries. March marked one year after riots broke out in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa; June was the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown; and - biggest of all - on Oct. 1, China marked the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic. Online censorship followed each in near lockstep. China blocked YouTube in March, Twitter in June and various proxy and virtual-private-network services - used to bypass domestic blocks and access to overseas websites - ahead of the National Day celebration. China's Web censors blocked Facebook in July after unrest broke out in Urumqi...
...country's array of Internet controls. "Many believe that the crackdown on porn was just an excuse," says Isaac Mao, a Chinese blogger and a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. "The real reason has to do with the various goals of Internet censorship, one of which is to curb the individual's voice...
...censorship in China is rarely an all-or-nothing endeavor. When a site begins to carry too many materials or too much commentary that the authorities find objectionable, it will get blocked if based overseas, or highly restricted or possibly closed if it's based in China. Web users move on to new haunts or find new routes to old ones. But by plugging enough holes and muffling enough dissenting voices, China's Communist Party curbs online opposition to its rule while still allowing the Internet to be open enough to not dangerously impede commerce...
...attention to what it described as CNNIC's lax standards for regulating Chinese domains. The .cn domain is a leading source of online fraud, according to the Internet-security firm McAfee, and the heightened requirements for registration could help ease that problem. (Read a brief history of Chinese Internet censorship...
...also prompted complaints. "The point is that there is no law that allows for this," wrote a commenter on a forum at Tianya, a Chinese Web forum. "As a government organization, why can the CNNIC disregard the laws?" Another Chinese commenter described the move as "the most substantial Internet censorship campaign I've seen...