News Web sites in China, complying with secret government orders, are requiring that new users log on under their true identities to post comments, a shift in policy that the country’s Internet users and media have fiercely opposed in the past. (NYT)

Nothing much to see here, move along. They’ve been trying to do this for years – this is the latest push.

Unless something dramatic has changed, it will still be way too easy to circumvent this by using false information. This is one of those policies that has little actual effect, but some bureaucrat somewhere will get a gold star for the effort, and the news media and Net critics will have something else to fit their meme of government controls.

By the way, I enjoyed the NYT’s use of the term “secret government orders.” Nice language, it sounds very Cold War-ish. It is technically true, in that this sort of policy is not handed down via published agency policy, but rather disseminated informally to the major players in the industry. Same thing goes on all through the entertainment industry (and others).

This entry was posted on Monday, September 7th, 2009 at 2:38 pm and is filed under China Law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.