The Chinese government is also believed to run an army of netizens to reinforce favourable opinion towards it and the Communist Party of China (CCP), dubbed the "50-cent army" in reference to how much they are said to paid.
Netizens are normally suspicious of governments, but this proposal might persuade even the most hardened anarchist that legislation has a role to play in cyberspace after all.
China's "netizens" frequently use occasions like these to criticise their own government in Beijing for not mustering as fierce a stance with regard to the disputed islets as is its old enemy, the KMT.
Music-streaming services may even reduce piracy, by providing a cheap, legal alternative.For all the newness of the internet and the netizens' claims to come from a different virtual world, the web is beginning to fit into the media world's oldest script: a new technology rides into town, the moguls try to destroy it, but it survives and becomes part of the town's future.
Since the early days of the internet, netizens have indulged in "massively multiplayer role-playing online games", a genre that, now complete with fancy graphics, is still very popular, particularly in Asia.
And SafeWeb will soon launch a service called "Triangle Boy" that allows netizens in democratic countries to turn their PCs into so-called proxy servers.
Concern among netizens about how firms use their personal data will spread, but not coalesce into a backlash.
After all, the Middle Kingdom barricades its netizens behind a powerful firewall that censors searches, curbs expression and cuts off access to parts of the web.
More than 50,000 netizens download the ICQ daily, putting it in the same league as new Web browsers from Microsoft and Netscape.In this section Have clogs, will travel Will it play in Penang?
Handing such a valuable monopoly over to private interests did not go down well with the netizens.
Behind a thick curtain Bigger guns are on their way A new grey zone Drawing a line under history Reprints Related topics Tehran IranThe only way netizens can reach censored sites is by using an array of "proxy" applications that work only sporadically and are considered less safe from the Revolutionary Guard's snooping internet police.
