Wednesday, September 11, 2002

WASHINGTON: US-based Internet firm AltaVista said Tuesday it had asked the Beijing government if and why its search engine was apparently blocked to Chinese users.

Fred Bullock, chief marketing officer for AltaVista, told AFP the company had asked Chinese officials twice in the past week if they had blocked access, as websurfers had reported, and that "as of today we have not heard from them."

Last week, Chinese Internet users reported that AltaVista appeared to have been blocked along with the massively popular website run by Google.

Observers in China said it was an apparent step in an information clampdown by Beijing ahead of a vital Communist Party meeting in November.

"We are trying to find out if AltaVista has been blocked by the Chinese Government, and if so why," Bullock said. "Until we have that determination, we can't say with 100% accuracy that we have been blocked."

The California-based firm said in a statement that two of its key portals, AltaVista.com and AltaVista.co.uk, were inaccessible in China, although some alternate sites operated by the firm remained available.

Bullock said company officials learned last week that traffic from China to its website had dropped off but noted that "because their infrastructure is still growing ... it's not uncommon to have network outages."

China routinely blocks a large number of foreign-based sites, primarily those featuring dissident views or banned groups such as the Falun Gong spiritual organisation, but also certain foreign news sites and pages showing pornography.

However it has not previously blocked entire search engines, which carry links to other sites but do not generally carry information themselves.

Bullock said AltaVista "stands for the free flow of information ... and any obstacles that prevent people from getting information are things we want to eliminate."

He said AltaVista had not received any request from the Chinese Government to restrict any particular websites, but pointed out that the company has no physical presence in China.

AltaVista does offer translation of websites into Chinese through another site, raging.com.

-AFP

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