Hong Kong government is completing its first round of consultation on the Control of Obscene and Indecent Article Ordinance (COIAO) at the end of January, 2009. The most debatable section is on the control over online new media as the existing practice of indecent and obscene censorship is very arbitrary and the extension of the ordinance to the internet may violate freedom of speech and expression. Moreover, the anti-smut campaign in China has become a pretext for political censorship, internet users in Hong Kong also worries that ISP level filtering will give an infrastructure for political censorship in the future.
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