IOC Admits Internet Censorship Deal With China

Dave writes "BEIJING (Reuters) — Some International Olympic Committee officials cut a deal to let China block sensitive websites despite promises of unrestricted access, a senior IOC official admitted on Wednesday. Persistent pollution fears and China's concerns about security in Tibet also remained problems for organizers nine days before the Games begin. China had committed to providing media with the same freedom to report on the Games as they enjoyed at previous Olympics, but journalists have this week complained of finding access to sites deemed sensitive to its communist leadership blocked. 'I regret that it now appears BOCOG has announced that there will be limitations on website access during Games time,' IOC press chief Kevan Gosper said, referring to Beijing's Olympic organizers. 'I also now understand that some IOC officials negotiated with the Chinese that some sensitive sites would be blocked on the basis they were not considered Games related,' he said." But yet somehow the mainstream media will ignore this because the Olympics are patriotic or something.

Comments

Re:What can they really do?

[ScentCone]

What other power do they have over China at this point? It's not like the IOC can impose sanctions on China, can it?

Of course they have power. They can rule that China's athletes cannot compete in the games. They made exactly such a politics-based ruling against the 7-person team from Iraq just last week. They've since changed their minds, and now TWO athletes from Iraq will be allowed to compete. The IOC's membership is aggressively anti-American (which is funny, considering that the largest share of the money from games-sponsoring and IOC-funding companies comes from the US), and play all sorts of games like this at the committee level. Police states like China get no grief from the IOC, but the US has no voting seat on the IOC's executive committee. In the same meeting during which the IOC decided to kill off baseball and softball from the games two years ago, the US was voted off of the executive committee. The IOC's president, in Belgium, appears not to have minded Iraq's previous Olympic committee chair (Uday Hussein, who had athletes beaten - and worse - for not winning games), but considers the fragile new Iraqi government too shaky, and too supported by the US, to put forth a team to his liking ... though North Korea, of course, is fine, and countries like China which actively lie about their ICO-related policies in order to get the games in their country can just hum along and get what they want.

Since China is being caught having lied about a central issue around which their obtaining of the games was focused, it seems appropriate for the IOC to threaten ruling out their own national team's participation. I can't think of a single better use of the IOC's capricious authority, but it would at least hit China where it hurts, and show the world that messing with reporters' use of the internet is typical policy there - and in direct contradiction to China's contingent-upon-getting-the-games promise of exactly the opposite.

Re:Only one thing left to do..

[A beautiful mind]

I'm boycotting the olympics but not primarily because of China. The whole overcommercialized, performance enhancing drug fueled, censorship and copyright problem ridden thing disgusts me to the core. It is the polar opposite of what the olympic spirit was.

I'm automatically excluding every brand on my purchase list as long as they feature ads in the Olympics theme or sponsor the Olympics.