internet - China's largest internet trial

Hefei, Anhui, earlier this week

A row of defendants, facing trial in the capital of Anhui province, Hefei, earlier this week, the largest case against internet users ever in China, reports the always diligent ESWN, who also has a long list of references to media reports.

Demographically, most of the defendants are high school graduates and five of them have university experience. For example, one defendant is a fourth-year-student majoring in mathematics/applied mathematics at the Shandong Institute of Technology; another defendant is a teacher at Number 8 Secondary School in the city of Shangqiu, Henan province.

Many of the defendants knew each other only over the internet and met for the first time during the trial. The case was widely reported in the Chinese media, but Western media kept silent. Why? There internet users were no political activists, but made money with porn. The initial free website www.99bbs.com was founded in 2002 by a 19-year old Fujian resident Wang Rong, who is still at large in the US. Because the servers were located in the US, it was out of reach for Chinese law enforcement. In 2003 it switched to porn and a year later it became a paid service. ESWN:

As a whole, the web site has more than 300,000 registered users who logged more than 400 million hits. As of 5 pm on November 15, 2004, the computer records show that the pornographic section had 75,772 registered users. It had 42,705 pornographic pictures which had been viewed a total of 32,734,600 times; there were 4,784 pornographic articles, which had been viewed a total of 24,340,060 times; there were 4,094 pornographic movies, which had been viewed 1,900,525 times. The brothel directory section had 47,452 registered users, with 207 web pages which had viewed 252,731 times. It is statistics such as these that have caused the media to label this as the greatest Internet criminal trial in Chinese history.

What the ESWN-dispatch otherwise shows is how powerless Chinese authorities are when it concerns "internet-related crimes". Summary of a summary, originating from Xinhua:

1. Since Internet technology is diversified and changing, it is difficult to block illegal websites.
2. Since the Internet service providers can see the high revenues from the web sites, some of these providers have formed business partnerships with the web sites and then they made it difficult for law enforcement to obtain criminal evidence.
3. The related laws are incomplete, so that it is difficult to determine the legality of web sites.
4. The public security bureau only has a small professional staff and therefore suffers from lack of manpower and technology. Since the telecommunications and Internet service providers are not cooperating, the staff is having a tough enough time trying to block these web sites and there is no time left to spend on collecting evidence and prosecuting these operators. The battle is being lost if they can only block one web site at a time.

Making money on the internet