China says controls on Internet needed to maintain stability
China says controls on Internet needed to maintain
stability
By Paul Carsten | Reuters – Wed, 19 Nov, 2014
WUZHEN China (Reuters) - Chinese officials called on
Wednesday for controls on the Internet to preserve stability, saying its model
for cyberspace regulation can be the framework for spawning commercial
successes like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.
The comments, made at the start of the World Internet
Conference (WIC), show China is unlikely to loosen its tight grip on the medium
even as it has begun a transformation of its economic model.
"This place is crowded with tourists, who are
perfectly orderly, and cyberspace should also be free and open, with rules to
follow and always following the rule of law," Lu Wei, China's Internet
chief and director of the State Internet Information Office, said at the
conference.
Lu was referring to China's eastern tourist town of
Wuzhen, roughly 75 miles from Shanghai, which is hosting the three-day
conference.
Among those attending the conference were executives from
Apple Inc, Facebook Inc, LinkedIn Corp, IBM Corp , Microsoft Corp, Qualcomm
Inc, SoftBank Corp, Cisco Systems Inc, Amazon.com Inc, Nokia, Intel Corp and
Thomson Reuters Corp.
They already got a taste of China's intent when on
Tuesday the Chinese government blocked access to a swathe of websites in what
an Internet monitoring group said was a blunt censorship campaign.
With a population of 1.4 billion and 632 million people
online, China is a market no one wants to miss out on. But it also has the
world's most sophisticated online censorship system, known outside the country
as the Great Firewall.
It blocks many social media services, such as Twitter,
Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and Google, along with many rights
groups sites and some foreign media agencies.
China's own Internet firms have seen huge success on
their home turf. Alibaba, which made a record-breaking $25 billion listing in
New York earlier this year, Tencent Holdings Ltd and Baidu Inc are together
worth more than $500 billion in market capitalization. All three of China's
biggest Internet companies were in attendance at the conference.
"The Internet is a double-edged sword," said
State Council Vice Premier Ma Kai at the conference.
"Well used, it's Alibaba's treasure. Poorly used,
it's Pandora's box. Cyber security is a shared challenge faced by human
society. Effectively dealing with it is a shared responsibility for all
governments," said Ma.
(Additional reporting by Beijing Newsroom; Editing by
Muralikumar Anantharaman)
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