Bill would bar U.S. firms from putting servers in China

IDG News Service - A U.S. lawmaker today introduced a bill that would bar U.S. Internet companies from locating Web servers inside "Internet-restricting" countries such as China and Vietnam. Under the proposed legislation, company officials who don't comply could face prison sentences.

The bill, introduced by Rep. Christopher Smith (R-N.J.), would also prohibit U.S. search engine companies from altering the results of searches in countries such as China and prohibit U.S. Internet companies from giving personally identifiable customer information to the governments of Internet-restricting countries. Exceptions would be granted for "legitimate" law enforcement requests that are reviewed by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The bill, called the Global Online Freedom Act, includes penalties of up to five years in prison and a $2 million fine for officers of companies that willfully violate the restrictions. Customers of Internet companies "aggrieved" by violations of the law could also sue the companies in civil court.

By requiring Internet companies to locate servers outside restrictive countries, the bill would make it harder for their governments to force the companies to turn over information about customers, Smith said Wednesday.

"Technology companies in the United States have succumbed to pressure by authoritarian foreign governments with information about Internet users that has led to imprisonment of cyber dissidents, in violation of the corporate responsibility of such companies to protect and uphold human rights," the bill says in its introduction.

Smith introduced the bill a day after he chaired a U.S. House of Representatives International Relations Committee hearing on Internet freedom in China. During the hearing, Smith and other committee members scolded Yahoo Inc., Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc., saying the companies have helped Chinese officials censor the Internet there.

Smith, chairman of the committee's Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations subcommittee, said Wednesday that the four companies' work in China amounted to a "sickening collaboration" with the Chinese government.

A Yahoo spokeswoman said today that the company was evaluating the Smith bill. A Microsoft spokeswoman said company officials had not yet seen the bill.

At the Wednesday hearing, Smith and other lawmakers criticized Yahoo because subsidiary Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong) Ltd. provided e-mail account information to the Chinese government that led to jail sentences for a Chinese political activist and a journalist.

They complained about Google offering a censored version of its search engine in China and about Microsoft removing from MSN Spaces a blog written by a Chinese journalist. Committee members also questioned whether Cisco is helping the Chinese government block access to some Web sites