China-Internet

Too many tax-payer funded technologies are being taken by China or other countries, Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., says, and on Friday he reintroduced a bill to stop the flow.

In order to operate in China, for example, American companies are often forced to hand over their intellectual property and proprietary. Many of those technologies are developed using taxpayer money through grant, loans, or other incentives, Webb said in a statement.

"If taxpayers supported the development of the technology, they own a piece of it and it can't just be given away," Webb said. "Federal dollars that go toward R&D funding, loan guarantees, and public-private partnerships in order to help develop the next generation of technologies here are supposed to be making American businesses competitive and generate American jobs -- not to help develop other industries, such as those in China."

Webb's bill would prohibit companies from transferring technology to countries that require such transfers as a cost of doing business.

"The transfer of publicly supported proprietary technologies by American firms to China -- and potentially other countries -- clearly and unequivocally places the competitive advantage of the American economy at risk," Webb said.

Monday:
T-Mobile will host a 9:30 am breakfast briefing to make the case for why America needs the D block auction. Featured speakers include former Motorola CTO Dennis Roberson.

Google hosts a 2:00 pm discussion on "10 Things You Don't Know About Online Advertising"

Tuesday:
The FCC will hold a 2:00 pm meeting of the Advisory Committee on Diversity for Communications in the Digital Age.

Wednesday:
The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a 10:00 am hearing on the "Electronic Communications Privacy Act: Promoting Security and Protecting Privacy in the Digital Age"

The Congressional-Executive Commission on China will hold a 2:15 pm hearing on intellectual property enforcement and new developments in counterfeiting, piracy and forced technology transfer.

Thursday:
The FCC will host its monthly open meeting at 10:30 am. The commission is likely to approve new rules that will make a portion of idle airwaves, known as white space, available for commercial use to build out Wi-Fi networks.

The Senate Commerce, Science and Technology Committee will hold a 10:00 am hearing on the need for a nationwide public safety network.

The House Armed Services Committee will hold a 10:00 am hearing on organizing for Cyberspace operations.

The Brookings Institution will host a day-long forum on regional innovation clusters. Speakers include John Fernandez, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development and Betsy Biemann, president of the Maine Technology Institute.

Top U.S. officials, including FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, met with a Chinese delegation in Washington on Tuesday for the fourth round of the US-China Information and Communication Technology Consultations.

Leader of the American contingent, Ambassador Philip Verveer, U.S. coordinator for communications and information policy, spoke with Tech Daily Dose and shared details about the meeting.

Discussions during the day-long session centered on net neutrality, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and the affirmation of commitments, Verveer said. Genachowski spoke extensively about the commission's national broadband plan and the core principles of an open Internet.

Despite the fact that China is widely criticized for censoring communication on the Internet, Verveer described the atmosphere as "very cordial." "These kinds of sessions are intended to be exchanges of view that advance mutual understanding," he added.

However, the U.S. took the opportunity to make their conventional points about Internet freedom and stressed the need for further discussion in upcoming meetings.

"The Chinese agree with us on some of the cyber security issues," Verveer said, citing one of the positive outcomes of the meeting. Cybersecurity is one of the issues that will be addressed in the next International Telecommunication Union's (ITU) Plenipotentiary Conference, which will be held in Mexico this October. The conference is the top policy-making body of the ITU.

Other topics addressed during the meeting include spectrum management, China's forthcoming telecommunications law and emerging innovations such as cloud computing.

China's Vice Minister of Industry and Information Technology, Xi Guohua, led the Chinese delegation.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's top adviser on innovation said Monday that 2009 was the worst year ever for Internet freedom but predicted 2010 will be better because of the growing attention to the issue of ensuring citizens around the world have access to new technologies and the Internet.

Alec Ross made the comments during a speech before the progressive think tank NDN in which he discussed the growing trend of governments around the world taking steps to limit their citizens' access to information on the Internet. He noted that "2009 was the worst year in the history of the Internet as it relates to Internet freedom ... where we saw the behavior of a handful of states grow to several dozen nations."

He noted that as he travels to some countries, he said it is remarkable "the degree to which the Internet increasingly looks like an Intranet. The upward march of technology offers both progress and peril." He added that while technology can be liberating, "it's also the case that government's can become increasingly sophisticated about their own use of technology to suppress freedoms."

Ross underscored many of the issues raised by Clinton during her January speech when she pledged to make Internet freedom a diplomatic priority and urged countries like China and Iran to embrace Internet freedom as a means of promoting economic prosperity.

He was asked after his speech about democratic nations that have begun imposing policies that place restrictions on the Internet such as Australia, where the government has proposed an Internet filtering system aimed at blocking children's access to pornographic Web sites.

The e-mail accounts of several journalists, human rights activists and academics who cover China have been hacked, the New York Times reported Wednesday.

The attacks targeted Yahoo e-mail accounts of those who write about China and Taiwan and began mostly last week after Google announced it would redirect all its users in China to its uncensored Hong Kong-based search site, the report said. The New York Times story's author, Andrew Jacobs, also noted that hackers also targeted him, saying they "altered e-mail settings so that all correspondence was surreptitiously forwarded to another e-mail address."

A Yahoo spokeswoman would not comment on specific security breaches. The company, however, did release a statement saying, "Yahoo! condemns all cyber attacks regardless of origin or purpose. We are committed to protecting user security and privacy and we take appropriate action in the event of any kind of breach."

Yahoo sold its Chinese operations in 2005 to a Chinese firm called Alibaba. Yahoo maintains a minority stake in the Yahoo China business but has no operational control.

Microsoft came under attack Wednesday from a House lawmaker for not following Google's lead in resisting China's demand for foreign firms to abide by the country's censorship rules and Internet restrictions.

During a hearing focused on Internet control in China before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, Rep. Chris Smith, R-NJ, singled out Microsoft, which has said it will continue to operate in China and follow Chinese laws. Microsoft "needs to get with the program" and "join the side of human rights...rather than enabling tyranny," Smith said.

In response, Microsoft spokeswoman Christina Pearson said, "We appreciate that different companies may make different decisions based on their own experiences and views. At Microsoft we remain committed to advancing free expression through active engagement in over 100 countries, even as we comply with the laws in every country in which we operate."

Google stopped censoring Chinese search results on Monday and began redirecting users to its uncensored Hong Kong-based site, although Chinese Web filters will block some of that content.

Commission Chairman Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., described Google's action as "a strong step in favor of freedom of expression and information" and "a powerful indictment of the Chinese government's insistence of censorship of the Internet."

Members of the commission, which is made up of House and Senate lawmakers, also praised another firm at the hearing, Go Daddy, the nation's biggest provider of Internet address registration services. Go Daddy General Counsel and Executive Vice President Christine Jones told the panel that increased surveillance by the Chinese government has prompted it to stop providing new address registration services for China's domestic domain name, .cn.

"We did not want to act as an agent of the Chinese government," she said.

Go-Daddy, the nation's largest provider of Internet address registration services, announced Wednesday that it would stop providing new Internet address registration services for China's domestic domain name, cn.

During testimony before a hearing on Internet control in China before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, Go Daddy General Counsel and Executive Vice President Christine Jones said the firm would continue to manage existing .cn names.

Go Daddy's announcement came just a few days after Google formerly stopped censoring its search results for users in China. Instead, Google is redirecting its users in China to its uncensored Hong Kong-based site. However, users in China are still being blocked from seeing some content opposed by the Chinese government because of the Web filters China uses.

A Chinese government official Monday condemned Google for its decision to begin redirecting Internet users in China to its Hong Kong-based site, where information is not censored. China's official Xinhua news service reported that an official with China's State Council Information Service said Google has "violated its written promise" and is "totally wrong."

Meanwhile, U.S. groups and officials praised Google's move. The firm announced in January that it planned to stop censoring its search results for users in China after it revealed it had been the victim of a cyber attack originating from China. Google Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond said Monday in a blog post that the firm has had a difficult time figuring out a way to keep its promise because Chinese officials maintained that censorship was a "non-negotiable requirement." He added that he believed the firm had reached a "sensible solution" by directing mainland China users to Google's uncensored Hong Kong site.

Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., a senior member of the House Foreign Relations Committee and the ranking Republican on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, said Google's move was "a remarkable, and welcomed action, and an important boost of encouragement for millions of Chinese human rights activists and political and religious dissidents. Google's recent deliberations and decision are a blow against the cynical silence of so many when it comes to the Chinese government's human rights abuses--a blast of honesty and courage and a good example of responsible and principled corporate policy."

Rep. David Wu, D-Ore., the first Chinese-American elected to serve in the House, said in an interview that the fact that Google followed through on its promise to stop censoring search results, is "absolutely commendable." He also said it "sets a business and moral example that other companies should follow. If Google can do it, so can a lot of other technology companies." Wu added that some other technology firms have told him privately "they want to do this." He declined, however, to name which firms he had talked to about the issue.

Google announced Monday that it has stopped censoring its search results for users in China and is redirecting users of Google.cn to its Hong Kong-based site, where it offers uncensored search services.

Google announced in January that it planned to stop censoring search results for users in China, a move it acknowledged may force the firm to leave the country. Google made the announcement after revealing it was the victim of a cyber attack originating from China that sought to gain access to the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

Google "made clear that these attacks and the surveillance they uncovered--combined with attempts over the last year to further limit free speech on the Web in China including the persistent blocking of Web sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Docs and Blogger--had led us to conclude that we could no longer continue censoring our results on Google.cn," Google Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond said in a blog post.

Since January, Google has been negotiating with Chinese officials to see if it could still operate in China and offer uncensored search results. "Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard," Drummond wrote. "We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement."

In response, he said Chinese users redirected to its Hong Kong site will be offered uncensored search results in "simplified Chinese" aimed at users in mainland China but delivered from the firm's servers in Hong Kong.

He said the firm believes this approach "is a sensible solution to the challenges we've faced--it's entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China," he said. "We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services." He noted the firm will be monitoring access issues and will provide updates on a special site.

He said Google plans to continue doing research and development work in China and maintain a sales operation in the country, though he said the size of that staff will depend on whether Chinese users will have access to its Hong Kong-site.

A State Department official said that Google is likely to announce Monday whether it will be pulling out of China, AP reported.

During a briefing, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said he expects Google to announce its plans Monday afternoon. While Crowley refused to speculate on what Google will announce, several recent reports said Google is likely to say it is leaving China.

Google announced in January that it would stop censoring search results for users in China, a move it acknowledged may force the firm to leave the country. Google made the announcement after revealing it was the victim of a cyber attack originating from China that sought to gain access to the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.