China, Working with a U.S. Company, Aims to Censor Online Content

China is already famous for massive Internet surveillance and censorship inside its borders. Now, through a partnership with American company XYZ.com, Chinese authorities are also aiming to censor online content around the world in an unprecedented suppression of Internet privacy and freedom.

It's no secret that China tops the list of countries that censor the Internet at home. The government has long made headlines for its "Great Firewall" and other efforts to suppress online freedom. But it has never before attempted to block content around the world.

That has changed as the result of a proposal that the company XYZ.com has submitted to ICANN, the organization responsible for managing Internet domains. XYZ is a Los Angeles-based company that controls several new top-level domains, or TLDs, including .xyz, .college, .security, .rent, .protection and .security.

TLDs are the highest level of a domain name. If you want to register a domain for your website, you have to do it with whoever controls the TLD you want to use. Since the namespace for traditional TLDs—.com, .net and .org, for example—has become overcrowded, ICANN in recent years has permitted the creation of new TLDs such as those administered by XYZ.

XYZ wants to ban the creation on the TLDs it controls of websites that contain words that the Chinese government has banned. The company has not disclosed the full blacklist, but it includes words in the vein of "democracy" and "human rights," according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

That would mean a website hosted at a domain such as democracy.xyz or freedom.college would be a no-go, as a result of censorship.

To be sure, the TLDs that XYZ controls are probably not among the very most popular out there. Still, for advocates of Internet privacy and openness—or just entrepreneurs who want to be able to operate freely in creating new sites—the XYZ proposal sets a dangerous precedent. Never before has Chinese government censorship extended across the Web. If ICANN approves the proposal, people around the world would face a form of Internet censorship that no privacy tool can circumvent.

Update: On Nov. 4, XYZ.com CEO Daniel Negari denied reports that his company has collaborated with Chinese authorities. As the EFF notes, it remains unclear whether the statement is the result of "a miscommunication in the proposal, or is a reversal of their previous position."