Public Content Filtering and Internet Control

China is one of the booming countries in the global economic competition. No larger international company from abroad can avoid at least thinking of investing in this growing market. Nevertheless, China is still famous for its suppression of fundamental human rights. Even the Internet, this space of presumably unlimited freedom, is no exception of the rule in this Socialist People’s Republic. In the meantime the Chinese Government has developed the most elaborated system of public Internet control worldwide, especially in terms of public content filtering. This book, based on research done in the year 2006, gives an overview of the instruments implemented in China to safeguard an extensive Internet control in this country and presents analysis of the legal situation in China under national Chinese law in comparison to the recent EU-legislation, fundamental human rights and international conventions. After it, a short overview of the public content filtering regime in the Republic of Singapore and the European Union is presented. At the end, the comparison of all three systems is made in order to highlight the peculiarities of the legal system implemented in China.

Thorsten Adelhardt holds a LL.M degree in IT-Law of the StockholmUniversity, Sweden, and a law-diploma of the UniversityErlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. Parts of his legal clerkship heworked in Singapore. Mr. Adelhardt is admitted to the German barand is nowadays working as legal inhouse at the German researchassociation Fraunhofer Gesellschaft.