Microsoft on Tuesday called for internet companies to adopt a common approach to dealing with official publication restrictions in China and elsewhere, as it continued to struggle with the fall-out from a decision to block an internet blog by a well-known Chinese dissident.
The US software company also modified its policy for deciding when and how to accede to official requests from governments around the world to ban particular writers from its MSN Spaces blog service. It said that under its new approach, while it would still have blocked the blogger in China under the Chinese restrictions, it would not have done so in other countries. The Microsoft service claims 15m bloggers, more than 3m of them inside China.