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BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Last Update: Feburary 10, 2006

Nearly 10% of the world population is online and the number is increasing rapidly. Taking China as an instance, the Internet became available in 1995. July 2005 statistics reports from China indicate 103 million Internet users with an annual growth of 18%, thus making China second only to the United States. With an annual growth of 18%, the number of the users is set to reach 121 million by July 2006 and 143 million by July 2007. China's Internet market is likely to become the largest in the world in the near future.

However, China is spending significant amounts of resources to censor the Internet to control information exchange and to clamp down on freedom of expression. A huge Internet firewall has been built by China using state-of-the-art technology and equipments from some giant western companies. According to some reports from the Chinese capital the Internet police force numbers reach up to 40,000. Experts estimate that new Internet surveillance equipment installed in 2002 was worth US$ 200 million.

Research at Harvard University showed that 10% of the web sites in United States are inaccessible in China at one time or another. 500,000 web sites are blocked. While websites or search engines carrying news or information on human rights, pro-democracy, or religious groups have been the major targets of China¡¯s Internet blockage, there is no telling of what kind of web content may be deemed ¡°political sensitive¡± and prevented from viewing by Internet users in China. China¡¯s Internet firewall also serves to block information of vital importance from knowing by the world. The recent examples are SARS and anti-sentiments against US in China on the 911, Challenger disaster etc. showed that the cover-up, distorted and misleading information can harm to its own people as well as other countries.

The censorship can eventually extend to business web sites as business interests become more prominent in a few years. A few years ago, a Hong Kong journalist was jailed for reporting on China¡¯s interest-rate policy. Google lost its major market shares to its counterpart Baidu in China just for a week since its search engines was shutdown and hijacked by China authority. There is no guarantee that China will not turn the unfair, fully controlled Internet to harm the interests of western companies in the near future.

Founded by a group of successful entrepreneurs and renowned professionals in computer and Internet who dedicated to providing technologies and service for people to exchange information on Internet freely and safely, UltraReach is the first company with a mission that offers Internet technology and service immune to the national Internet censorship in China and other censor countries.

The following are the related reports about Internet censorship from news media, US congress and research institutes and organizations.

News and Media Reports

US Congress

Research Institutes and Organizations
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