freedom of speech

According to the report made by Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing shut down over 1.3 million websites last year alone.

The ASS says that the shutdowns resulted in a 41% decrease of the total number of Chinese website by the end of last year. However, ASS spokesman Liu Ruisheng claimed China enjoyed a "high level of freedom of online speech."

Still, the number of web pages in China increased by 79% so far.

A lawsuit has been filed with the US District Court in Manhattan by 8 New York residents. The plaintiffs are suing Baidu Inc and the People's Republic of China accusing the search engine of conspiring with the country's government to censor pro-democracy speech.

In their filing plaintiffs claim that the Chinese company violates the U.S. Constitution and name not only Baidu by also the Chinese government as defendants. According to the plaintiffs’ lawyer it is the first case of its type.

As a result of an inquiry sent by the US senate Homeland Security Committee over the release of classified U.S. government documents on the WikiLeaks website Amazon.com Inc has stopped hosting Julian Assange’s web resource.

It is known that after hackers tried to flood the website in order to prevent users from accessing classified information WikiLeaks turned to Amazon to keep the site available. Now WikiLeaks says it is being hosted by other servers in Europe.

As reported by the participants at the international "Internet at Liberty" conference sponsored by Google, Internet activists in the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia are increasingly using collaborative Internet sites as well as circumvention and anonymity tools to avoid censorship.

Global Internet treaty was proposed last week at the Internet Governance Forum in Lithuania. The treaty would enshrine in law the founding principles of open standards and net neutrality, and protect the web from political interference.

Countries like Turkey and China should be pressed on a governmental level so that lift restrictions imposed by these nations on the Internet freedom, said Google’s top legal man. David Drummond argued at a public meeting with US Trade Rep Ron Kirk and other Mountain View wonks at the Googleplex on Wednesday that such behaviour by individual countries was bad for US trade.

"Internet censorship is really a trade barrier, and is operating that way for US companies that are trying to do business abroad," he grumbled.

North Korean move to join Twitter was welcomed by the US government who also called upon the insular nation to let its citizens also see the recently opened account and access the web at all.

"We use Twitter to connect, to inform, and to debate. We welcome North Korea to Twitter and the networked world," wrote Philip Crowley, a state department spokesman on his Twitter account.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) urged Turkish government to stop blocking Google’s video sharing website YouTube as well as a great number of other web services under its Internet law that in fact do not cover these web resources.

Three Google executives - chief legal officer David Drummond, former Google Italy board member George De Los Reyes and global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer - were convicted by a Milan court in a lawsuit over violating the privacy of an Italian boy with autism by letting a video of him being bullied be posted on the site in 2006. The defendants were sentenced to the six-month suspended jail terms in Italy. Google plans to appeal the decision.

Charles Zhang, the CEO of China’s No. 2 Internet portal Sohu.com Inc, said on Wednesday that in view of the government’s tight control over the national media China will unlikely have any voice heard on the international stage. He noted that plans to create global Chinese media giants were doomed to fail if the government did not relax controls.

 Wikipedia is sued by a murderer who committed a disgusting manslaughter of a famous German actor Walter Sedlmayr. Attorneys took legal actions against the online encyclopedia on behalf of Wolfgang Werlé, one of two men to receive a life sentence for the 1990 murder of Sedlmayr.

 According to a 2009 international ranking by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) the United States saw an improvement in press freedom in the last year and the country climbed up to Number 20 in the group's Press Freedom Index. The media expert noted that the shift in the Washington approach was likely influenced by the expectations of the presidency by Barack Obama in January after eight years under President George W. Bush. Meantime, European countries lost their upper positions.