US trade officials have asked for more information as they weigh whether to pursue a case against Chinese Internet restrictions that impede Google and other companies, an attorney for a US free speech group said on Friday.
“They’ve asked us for more detail about it. We are trying to put that together right now,” said Gilbert Kaplan, a partner at King and Spalding, which represents the First Amendment Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday challenged Beijing and other authoritarian governments to end Internet censorship, an issue that has strained US-China ties after Google threatened to leave China because of hacking incidents and Web restrictions.
The US free speech group, known then as the California First Amendment Coalition, first approached the US Trade Representative’s (USTR) office in late 2007 with the idea of challenging China’s barriers to Internet access at the WTO.
It gave the trade office, run at the time by the Republican administration of former US president George W. Bush, “a very extensive white paper, or memo, describing the WTO violations that the ‘Great Firewall’ caused, and that were actionable in our view under the WTO, and a request that USTR begin a WTO case against China regarding the Firewall,” Kaplan said.
Although no case was filed, Kaplan said US trade officials never ruled out that possibility.
“We’re continuing to request that they start that case. That dialogue is continuing,” Kaplan said.
A spokeswoman for the US trade representative’s office had no immediate comment. A study by the Brussels-based think tank ECIPE in November called government censorship the biggest trade barrier that Internet companies face.
Many countries censor the Internet for political or moral reasons. China has developed one of the most pervasive methods. In Cuba, all unauthorized surfing is illegal, while many Western countries limit access to child porn sites. A WTO case could help “clarify the circumstances in which different forms of censorship are WTO-consistent,” ECIPE said.
RELUCTANT
Peter Scheer, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, said USTR’s main problem with bringing a case two years ago was that US companies were reluctant to publicly associate themselves with a challenge.
“It was very difficult at that time to get companies to cooperate with USTR. Not because they weren’t supportive of the objective in theory. They were. But rather at that time they feared reprisals from the government of China,” Scheer said.
“I think that fear was and remains frankly understandable,” Scheer said.
That is why it would be a “very positive development” if the administration of US President Barack Obama were to decide on its own to bring a case against Beijing, he said.
Nicole Wong, associate general counsel at Google, sits on the coalition’s board of directors, though Scheer said she does not formally represent her company in that capacity.
China agreed as part of its commitments to join the WTO in 2001 that US service companies would have the same access in China as their own companies.
“We believe that applies to the Internet and Internet companies,” Kaplan said.
China’s Web restrictions in effect force US Internet companies to “put servers and hardware in China, rather than doing what they do everywhere else in the world, which is use their US base,” Kaplan said.
“If we try to serve the Chinese market from the US or anywhere outside the Great Firewall, our Internet access is so slow that no one will use our sites,” he said.
WTO rules also require countries to follow transparent and understandable procedures, he said. Instead, China “is very randomly stopping our Internet companies and our Internet access with no prior notice and no set of regulations,” Kaplan said.
OBAMA
Meanwhile, US President Barack Obama is “troubled” by cyberattacks on Internet titan Google and wants answers from China, the White House said on Friday.
The State Department said meanwhile that US and Chinese diplomats have held several meetings to discuss the attacks, which Google said targeted the e-mail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, and more talks were expected.
“We are having high-level meetings and we will continue to have meetings and we will continue to press this issue aggressively,” US State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said. “We will continue to seek an explanation from China.
“A blanket denial that nothing happened we don’t think is particularly helpful,” Crowley added.
Obama is also looking to Beijing to shed light on the cyberattacks, which have prompted Google to say it will stop censoring Web search results in China, a move that may force it to leave the country entirely.
“As the president has said, he continues to be troubled by the cybersecurity breach that Google attributes to China,” White House deputy spokesman Bill Burton said. “As Secretary [Hillary] Clinton said yesterday, all we are looking for from China are some answers.”
Clinton on Thursday urged Beijing to conduct a thorough investigation into the cyberattacks on Google and other US firms and criticized China and other nations for censoring the Web and restricting the “free flow of information.”
The secretary of state’s comments, in a wide-ranging speech on Internet freedom, drew the strongest reaction to date from China since the Google dispute erupted last week.
“We firmly oppose such words and deeds, which go against the facts and are harmful to China-US relations,” foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu (馬朝旭) said. “We urge the United States to respect facts and stop using the so-called Internet freedom issue to criticize China unreasonably.”
Ma urged the US not to let the Google row upset relations, which are already dogged by a range of disputes over trade and currency issues, US arms sales to Taiwan and climate change.
Ma said China hoped both sides would “respect each other’s core interests and major concerns, properly handle differences and sensitive issues to maintain the healthy and steady development of Sino-US relations.”
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