Poynter: China's Internet Filters Work Overtime

China's attempt to censor Internet access points in the country is again running into problems. Filters banning more than 1,000 words began to clog some months ago, prompting some ISPs to offload the filtering to users' computers. Of course, enterprising hackers took the opportunity to uncover the list of verboten words and spread it around, causing still further performance issues as the filters start to work overtime. While China has made a great deal of noise about controlling the internet for fear of the ills of pornography, only about one in five of the words on the list seem sexually oriented. The others are political terms, including terms related to democracy, Falungong and the names of political officials.

An effort two years ago to conduct such filtering was technically botched when the filters started to fail to keep up, slowing down China's entire internet. As part of that effort in the summer of 2002, Google was temporarily shut down in the country. The filters have been gradually reintroduced in the intervening months, but seem to be working at about capacity.