Chinese Gov't Not A Big Fan Of User-Generated Video; Expands Great Firewall To License All Video Sites

from the bureaucracy-and-user-generated-content-don't-mix dept

It's well known that China goes to tremendous lengths to censor and block certain types of content online through a combination of tens of thousands of "internet police" combined with vague rules that are left up to various ISPs to enforce or face sanctions (meaning they tend to be even more quick to block than they may need to be). It appears that even that wasn't enough to deal with the rise of user-generated video sites in the country. The Chinese government has a new policy demanding that all video upload sites must get a license from the government, must be state-owned or state-controlled and (of course) must not allow any video that "involves national secrets, hurts the reputation of China, disrupts social stability or promotes pornography." As the article notes, this likely effects most Chinese YouTube clones (who are mostly private, rather than state-owned), though it's unclear how it will impact foreign sites, such as YouTube itself. The most likely outcome is that ISPs will soon start banning those sites completely in favor of the limited state-owned sites. Such is life on the internet behind the Great Firewall.

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