A Web site registered to the “.tw” country code, which raised concerns among legislators because of its dissemination of Chinese propaganda, was shut down for “national security concerns” on Friday evening.
The Web site, www.31t.tw, was registered through US-based domain name registrar GoDaddy by a Chinese government agency and disseminated information about China’s “31 incentives” — a set of measures designed by Beijing to attract Taiwanese professionals and academics.
The National Communications Commission (NCC) took the issue to the National Security Council after legislators raised the issue during a committee meeting at the legislature on Tuesday.
Screengrab from the 31t.tw Web site
The council confirmed on Friday that the site presented a threat to national security, and the commission shut it down at 8pm.
The site’s registrant was found to be Beijing Strait Culture Exchange Co Ltd (北京海峽文化交流有限公司) — a Chinese government-affiliated organization under the direct administration of China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, Presidential Office spokesman Alex Huang (黃重諺) said on Friday.
As the site’s purpose is evidently to disseminate Chinese propaganda in Taiwan, it contravenes Article 34 of the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), he said.
The article prohibits “any political propaganda for the Chinese Communist Party” being broadcast in the “Taiwan area.”
Legislators on Tuesday said that they were concerned that Beijing was taking advantage of the nature of country domains — which generally do not require a registrant to be a resident of the domain’s country, or for the Web site’s server to physically reside there — to “infiltrate” the nation’s Web space.
Taiwanese could be misled into believing the information on the site had originated with Taiwanese authorities, or that it had received their approval, and was therefore trustworthy, they said.
Commission spokesman Wong Po-tsung (翁柏宗) said that after hearing from the council on Friday he asked the Taiwan Network Information Center — the agency entrusted by the US-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to handle Web sites registered to Taiwan’s country code top-level domain — to revoke registration of the Web site’s URL in the agency’s systems.
Once the URL was unregistered, the site became inaccessible regardless of where the server hosting the site’s files was, as only the network center’s systems can resolve Web site addresses registered to Taiwan’s domain, Wong said.
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