eBay’s Skype says text messages censored by China
Published April 20th, 2006
Internet communications company Skype, which was bought by eBay in September 2005, has revealed that text messages sent to China are censored in compliance with state law.
Skype and its partner in China, Tom Online, had been accused of censoring text messages that contained banned terms like ‘Falun Gong’ and ‘Dalai Lama’, according to the Financial Times.
Niklas Zennstrom, co-founder and chief executive of Skype, addressed the issue with the Financial Times saying: ‘Tom had implemented a text filter, which is what everyone else in that market is doing. Those are the regulations.’
China is one of Skype’s biggest markets along with the US and Germany and Mr Zennstrom indicated that Skype had no option but to comply with the regulations of the host country.
He insisted that: ‘I may like or not like the laws and regulations to operate businesses in the UK or Germany or the US, but if I do business there I choose to comply with those laws and regulations. I can try to lobby to change them, but I need to comply with them. China in that way is not different.’
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