Chinese Cyber Café’s New Rules: 2

These new laws, according to Xiao Qiang who is the director of the California based China Internet Project, the new rules will help authorities make sure that all activity running out of cyber café’s is legal under their laws. The online casino raids from previous months were responsible for the seizure of many computers and the arrests of over 20 people. The way that the Chinese authorities plan on tracking the activity of cyber café’s is by giving anyone that wants to access the internet from a café an identification card which they will have to use to log in to a café computer. No matter where you are accessing internet from in China, it can be monitored. This means that if any citizen tries to access pornography, illegal online casinos, or pretty much anything related to gambling, you may be watched.

The Chinese government has a pretty tight grip on what they let their citizens access over the internet. There are many websites that are blocked, including online casinos, which citizens have been arrested for because they accessed a prohibited site or because they sent sensitive government information over an email. One of the cyber café owners that the Associated Press spoke with told them that government officials came to their shop and replaced all of their computers and previously pirated software with licensed copies. The owner added that he had to raise his prices because his costs rose ‘dramatically’ but he explained that the customers of his café were okay with the change in prices because the performance of their computers improved so dramatically. The online casino industry in China has yet to see changes.

China is the country with the world’s largest population and has the highest number of internet users, a grand total of 253 million people. The online casino industry is booming in their neighbor, Japan. A spokesperson for the Red Flag Linux software, Fan Hongguan, said that they have been developing a way for cyber café’s to have a chat option with their software. "It makes sense for Internet cafes to use (Red Flag) because of their high user traffic and the system's safeguards against viruses," Fan said.