I guess this is one of those good news/bad news situations:

China’s technology ministry moved to tighten controls on Internet use Tuesday, saying individuals who want to operate Web sites must first meet in person with regulators.

The state-sanctioned group that registers domain names in China froze registrations for new individual Web sites in December after state media complained that not enough was being done to check whether sites provided pornographic content.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said that ban was being lifted, but would-be operators would now have submit their identity cards and photos of themselves as well as meet in person with regulators and representatives of service providers before their sites could be registered. (AP)

Man, if they could just clean up that porn, then the Net could be liberalized once again and everyone would be happy. Yeah.

Well, the good news is that individuals may once again register (i.e., you don’t have to be a licensed enterprise). Sure, it’s cheap to capitalize a new company here (RMB 30,000), but that’s still real money for startups and folks that just want to set up a website for a variety of non-commercial reasons.

The bad news is actually not too bad. The ID card check, for example, is not such a terrible thing. I could even justify it from my role as an intellectual property lawyer. Very often I have to deal with web sites that are offering to sell counterfeit products whose domain names are held by folks that cannot be tracked down.

The photo and in-person meeting seems a bit more Big Brotherish, but of course this is just another way to make sure that these applications are not being faked.

I understand that the political dissident crowd is not going to like this sort of thing. I get it, and I realize that this is not just about porn. However, there could be some benefits to a system like this as well, so I’m going to withhold judgment for the moment and see how the implementation goes.