China has succeeded in blocking the flow of news about its crackdown on Tibetan protesters. While China has traditionally exerted strong control by traditional media outlets such as television, radio and newspapers, that week’s developments are notable for the country’s effective control of YouTube, blogs and other World Wide Web communications.

While Western news outlets are getting knowledge out to the rest of the world, many Chinese remain in the dark. The Wall Street Journal reported that Baidu.com, China’s largest search engine, turns up no news in a search for “Tibet” (the fifth most popular search term on Baidu Monday), while searches for “Tibet riot” produce hits to pages that have been removed.

In addition, China’s major Net portals, Sina and Sohu.com, are devoid of news of the uprising and repression. And Chinese Web video sites Tudou.com, Youku.com and 56.com — the Chinese equivalents of YouTube — are similarly vacant.

YouTube Blocked

Of course, YouTube itself has many videos of

the protests, but China has blocked the Google-owned site. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said the company is looking into the reports of blocking.

Observers are not completely certain how China is blocking all the news, the Journal reported. In some cases, entire domains are blocked; in other cases, only assured pages. While editors of state-run media frequently avoid controversial topics, independent Web companies plus cooperate with censorship; they are mandatory to monitor user-supplied substance and delete pornography, as well as a list of forbidden topics.

The censorship raises a challenge to the much-vaunted claim that the Web views censorship as network damage and routes around it — a claim no less a technology luminary than Bill Gates repeated last month. “I don’t see any risk in the world at large that someone will restrict free subject matter flow on the World Wide Web. You cannot control the World Wide Web,” the Microsoft…

Orginal post by Top Tech News