China Eases Real-Name Blog Effort

[R.A. Hettinga]

That quaint old Texas expression "pissin' in the wind" comes to mind.

Some days, I really do think that Duncan Frissell was right.

Markets and geodesic networks *are* the blob that ate the state.


Cheers,
RAH
Other days, of course, I don't even wanna get out of bed, it's so depressin'...
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<http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB117985706995511069.html>

The Wall Street Journal


China Eases Real-Name Blog Effort

By JASON LEOW

May 23, 2007

BEIJING -- China has confirmed it will back down from a campaign to require
citizens to register their real names before they can start blogging, after
sharp protests from industry players caused the government to rethink the
policy.

The government tried to require bloggers to register their true identities
in order to curb, or at least reduce, the amount of pornography,
antigovernment views and other posts that officials deemed threatening to
social order.

Monday's announcement by the Internet Society of China, a
government-affiliated think tank, that it will advocate voluntary -- rather
than mandatory -- real-name registration was the first official
confirmation of the policy change, reported in The Wall Street Journal last
week.

The Internet Society released a draft of a pact that blogging companies can
choose to sign and said it will collect public reaction until May 28. The
pact encourages Internet companies to set up real-name blogging spaces, but
it won't force an end to current blog sites that don't require
identification.

China has some 20 million bloggers, of whom seven million to eight million
are active users who update their sites at least once a week.


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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'