p2p news / p2pnet: Skype has joined the CCC (China Censorship Club).

eBay’s Niklas Zennström admits Tom Online, Skype’s joint venture partner in China, has censored text messages containing words and phrases such as ‘Falun Gong’ and ‘Dalai Lama’.

“Tom had implemented a text filter, which is what everyone else in that market is doing,” said Zennström, quoted in the Financial Times.

“Those are the regulations.”

eBay, Skype and Tom are in good company. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco all openly help China in its efforts to proscribe Net traffic and activities which don’t accord with the party line.

Zennström, “claimed that compliance with Chinese censorship was no different from obeying rules governing business in western countries,” says the story. “China, along with the US and Germany, is one of Skype’s three biggest markets in terms of active users of its free telephony service, which routes encrypted calls between computers via the internet.”

He insisted the actions of Tom-Skype had not put users at risk, says the FT.

“Referring to the measures taken by the joint venture, Mr Zennström said: ‘One thing that’s certain is that those things are in no way jeopardising the privacy or the security of any of the users’.”

Also See:
Financial Times - Skype says texts are censored by China, April 18, 2006

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If you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent website blocking outside of China.

Download it here and feel free to copy the zip and host it yourself so others can download it.

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