CNN: China slaps on new Web rules

According to regulations effective on August 1, Web portals and other Internet publishers must obey the new rules or suffer unspecified punishments, the official Economic Daily said on Monday.

The Internet poses an unprecedented threat to the control that the Chinese Communist Party wields over other forms of media and most Internet content providers in China have exercised self-censorship in order to stay in business.

With the fast development of the Internet in China has come across "a series of problems which call for more effective regulation," the Economic Daily said.

The new rules come on the heels of an announcement by the world's best-known hackers that they plan to offer free software to promote anonymous Web surfing in countries where the Internet is censored.

Web police

Beijing's new regulations will limit the number and structure of Web publishers and call for their supervision and possible punishment, the newspaper said without saying what punishments could be incurred.

Key types of content that invite scrutiny from teams of "Web police" in Beijing believed to be trawling the Web are pornography, which is banned, and mention of Tibet, democracy in China or the banned spiritual group Falun Gong.

The rules apply to formal publishers on the Web of books, newspapers, periodicals, audio-visual products and edited works of literature, art, natural or social sciences and technical engineering, newspapers said.

But the hackers gathered in New York over the weekend said that they are working on a technology that if widely adopted would allow anyone to create grassroots networks where Internet users could access and share information without a trace.

The champion of that technology, the internationally known hacker called "Mixter," said over the weekend he had named it "Six/Four" in honour of the date of the massacre of students protesting in Tiananmen Square in 1989.