Webmasters told to provide real names
- Source: Global Times
- [07:36 June 18 2009]
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By Ji Beibei
People who manage websites will have to register their real names under guidelines issued Tuesday.
Sponsors, editors and webmasters will have to register with their real names as part of the measures introduced by the Beijing Internet Publicizing Management Office to “clean up the network environment,” the Office of the Capital Spiritual Civilization Construction, which helped launch the campaign, said.
The Beijing Internet Publicizing Management Office did not reveal when the registration system will be put into effect.
The Global Times’ calls and faxes to the office yesterday went unanswered.
Meanwhile, the city’s cultural market law enforcement authority and the Beijing Bureau of Culture will recruit about 10,000 volunteer Internet café supervisors to root out and delete online porn “in the near future,” the Beijing Times reported yesterday.
Zhang Fengyou, director of the Network Department of the Beijing Bureau of Culture told the Global Times yesterday she had “no idea” about the recruitment plan.
Telephone calls to the cultural market law enforcement authority also went unanswered yesterday.
The regulation means that webmasters might have to register their real names and other personal information, instead of just applying for an online identity as they did previously, Zhang Youming, a former webmaster, told the Global Times yesterday.
“The measure is only one step of the whole tightening process of Internet management in China,” he said, without elaborating.
“It is similar to the case of Hangzhou.”
On May 1, authorities in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang Province, launched a real-name registration system for Web users. Over twenty days later, the Shanghai-based Wenhui Daily reported that the measure had failed as many websites and forums in Hangzhou still operated in the same way as they had done before and that no one had implemented the measure.
“We didn’t receive any papers about it,” the newspaper quoted a Hangzhou official as saying on May 24.