China’s notorious online controls have long been criticized as censorship by human rights groups, businesses, Chinese Internet users and others.
Now they have earned a new label from the US government: trade barrier.
US trade officials have, for the first time, added China’s system of Internet filters and blocks — broadly known as the “Great Firewall” — to an annual list of trade impediments. The entry said that, over the past decade, the limits have “posed a significant burden to foreign suppliers, hurting both Internet sites themselves and users, who often depend on them for business.”
The move, which is not likely to have immediate repercussions, highlights the US government’s growing concern about Chinese Internet regulations and could foreshadow more aggressive actions. It also underscores the opposing visions the world’s two largest economies have about how the Internet should work and be managed.
The report from the Office of the US Trade Representative said that, over the past year, the “outright blocking of Web sites appears to have worsened,” adding that eight of the top 25 most popular global sites are blocked in China.
“Much of the blocking appears arbitrary; for example, a major home improvement site in the United States, which would appear wholly innocuous, is typical of sites likely swept up by the ‘Great Firewall,’” the report said.
China blocks some of the biggest corporate names on the Internet, including services offered by Google, Facebook and Twitter. That can hobble the ability of foreign companies to do business in China, whether through blocked Web sites or workplaces that cannot reach Gmail. China also blocks a growing number of foreign news outlets, including the New York Times’ Web site.
Any effort by the US to persuade China to reduce its Internet censorship would most likely be a nonstarter. The Chinese government considers the close control of online discourse a matter of national security, largely out of concerns about the Internet’s power to aid the organization of protests and the spread of dissent. As a result, Beijing has shown little flexibility on issues of censorship and it tends to block any Internet media it feels it does not have complete control over.
China cites the threat of online espionage, pointing to disclosures by Edward Snowden, the former US National Security Agency contractor, which showed US intelligence efforts to use US hardware abroad to gather information.
The office added China’s Internet censorship policies to its annual National Trade Estimate Report, released on March 31. The insertion was reported on April 1 by Inside US Trade, a trade publication.
Some of the largest US Internet companies and foreign trade groups have long lobbied the US to treat censorship as a trade matter. For example, in 2008, Google’s deputy general counsel testified before a US Senate subcommittee that the US government should make the matter a central issue in trade talks.
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