Regulation

There are five supervisory bodies of the Internet in China

1. The Internet Propaganda Adminstrative Bureau (the Executive)
2. The Internet Bureau and Bureau of Information and Public Opinion, which come under the CPCs Publicity Department (the former Propaganda Department)
3. The Ministry of Information Industry (MII)
4. The Ministry of Public Securitys Computer Monitoring and Supervision Bureau
5. The MII Centre for the Registration of Illegal and Unsuitable Internet Content.

A Internet company in China must be registered with the Executive. If the company does not have a license, then their website can be taken down at any time by the Executive. Various forms of communication have been established between the leading commercial websites in China and these supervisory bodies (phone, email, text messaging, instant messaging, web platforms, in addition to weekly meetings) The supervisory bodies uses these means of communication to instruct these websites to not publish certain articles, not cover a issue or event, and censor certain comments The websites are to respond as quickly as possible. Every Friday, the leading 19 websites in China send employees to a meeting wit the Internet Information Bureau, Subjects most interesting to the Supervisory body is evaluated and some sites are criticized. At the end of the meeting, bureau members announce the subjects to be covered in the upcoming week, articles to be written under supervision, and articles that must be eliminated.

Censorship

To comply with orders, all online companies set up a section solely to monitor all letters, comments, articles, and messages on their website. Key word censorship is utilized by the leading websites to avoid fines. The three kinds of key word censorship:

1. Masked words (words replaced by *******)
2. Sensitive words (words that need to be checked by moderators before they can be posted
3. Taboo words (words that cannot appear in an article)

*Any keywords remotely related to the Tiananmen Square Massacre (1989 Student movement, unrest, rioting, have been banned from appearing on the internet). Chinese authorities send orders for three type of bans (prior to publication, post publication, and propaganda directives)

1. Prior to publication bans are on articles that are going to be released
2. Post publication bans are on any new articles regarding a subject that is considered taboo by the Chinese supervisory bodies.
3. Propaganda directives are orders by the Supervisory bodies to post a certain article or replace an article with another the body wants to be posted on the web.

Enforcement and Punishment

Websites that break the internet regulation laws of China are subject to criticism, fines, dismissal of a site employee responsible for offensive content or forcing an entire site section or an entire website to shut down. To help China regulate what is on the internet, China has established the Golden Shield, an eight-year, $700 million project to create a communication network and computer information system that would help the internet police better monitor, filter, and block online content. While the Golden Shield has helped China better monitor internet content, savvy internet users are still able to get around these barriers with relative ease...if they know how. Otherwise, the consequences for breaking internet content laws are severe. Reporters Without Borders says China jails more people for expressing their views on the Internet than any other country. However, there are holes that cyber dissidents can exploit.

First amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abriding the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for redress of grievances.

Regulation

Since 1996, various states have tried to pass internet censorship legislation that restricts the online distribution of material that is harmful to minors. All of these laws have been struck down on constitutional grounds. For example: In 1996, Philadelphia enacted the Communications Decency Act (CDA). The CDA would have made it illegal to distribute online material that, under contemporary community standards would be deemed offensive to minors under the age of eighteen. The CDA would have allowed prosecutors to:

1. Use credit card or other age verification systems
2. Allowed any good faith effort by the prosecutors to restrict access to minors.

The US Supreme Court struck down the ruling on grounds that

1. It violated the first amendment (freedom of speech).
2. Because it was unconstitutionally vague and was wholly unprecedented. It was not just limited to commercial speech or entities but also non-profit entities and individuals posting indecent messages or displaying them on their computers (Anyone who posted indecent material could be subject to criminal prosecution under this law).

In essence, the Supreme Court ruled the CDA was not narrow enough to achieve the goal of protecting minors from indecent content and also lacked the precision required for a statute aiming to protect free speech.The rulings from these cases make it clear that the United States government is not going to start regulating the internet anytime soon.

Censorship

The United States Supreme Court struck down another law, The Child Online Protection Act (COPA) COPA was first enacted by congress in 1998, and required commercial web publishers to ensure that minors did not access harmful material on their Web Site, Violators would be subject to fines of up to $50,000 per day for violations. The Supreme court struck down COPA with similar reasoning to its ruling on the CDA. It ruled that the law was unconstitutional because:

1. It was not effective in protecting kids
2. It would burden valuable, fully lawful content aimed at adults (such as safe sex information sites and art gallery sites) from being accessed
3. Filtering technology is more effective at preventing minors from viewing indecent content and would not violate the first amendment.

Enforcement and Punishment

As the COPA ruling states, there can be no federal laws stopping Americans from accessing any content. Internet Regulation in the US is self imposed.All efforts to make certain internet postings (indecent material) punishable by law have been struck down by the United States Supreme Court due to the Bill of Rights. People are free to post anything on the internet without any repercussions from the government. However, when US internet companies do business overseas in countries (such as China) which have much more stringent internet regulation laws, these companies are subject to those local laws (In China, internet users do not have civil rights). This is what has caused much of the controversy in China, U.S companies (such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft) assisting the Chinese government in censoring content and even assisting in the capture of internet dissidents. US internet companies have regularly sacrificed ethics for the sake of business. The United States Congress has started to crack down on these questionable practices. For more information, go to the U.S Assisting with Web and Internet Court Cases in China.