Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and US Trade Representative Ron Kirk said China may be violating World Trade Organization obligations with its rule that all computers sold in the country from July 1 have the "Green Dam" program.

"China is putting companies in an untenable position by requiring them, with virtually no public notice, to pre-install software that appears to have broad-based censorship implications and network security issues," Locke said.

Locke and Kirk said they sent joint letters to their counterparts at China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Ministry of Commerce.

Beijing says the Chinese-made Green Dam software will filter out pornography, protecting young people within the world's largest online population.

But trade and rights groups fear that Green Dam is another attempt by China to control access to the Internet.

China has a history of blocking access to sites carrying politically sensitive topics such as the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown on democracy protesters and the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement.

"Protecting children from inappropriate content is a legitimate objective, but this is an inappropriate means and is likely to have a broader scope," Kirk said in a joint statement with Locke.

"Mandating technically flawed Green Dam software and denying manufacturers and consumers freedom to select filtering software is an unnecessary and unjustified means to achieve that objective, and poses a serious barrier to trade," Kirk said.

US embassy officials already met Chinese authorities last week to voice "concern" about the software, without publicly demanding that Beijing drop the rule.

But Chinese state media said Tuesday that Beijing would not back away from the new rule.

Earlier this month, the state-run Liberation Daily newspaper said that China was trying to protect young people among the country's 300 million Internet users.

"The state encourages research into Internet products that help minors surf the web in a healthy manner," it said.

Questions have also been raised about the Internet software's security vulnerabilities.

Researchers at the University of Michigan who examined the software have said it contained serious security vulnerabilities that could allow outside parties to take control of computers running it via remote access.

The row over the Chinese software comes as technology takes an emblematic role in the protests in Iran, where critics of the clerical regime have turned to Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites to mobilize.

A senior State Department official said that the United States raised concerns with China about the Green Dam software after appeals by US computer makers, which did not want to be seen as assisting Beijing's censorship.

China has often pressured Internet search engines. Last week, state media said China had shut down some of Google's search services for allegedly failing to eliminate pornography from its Chinese sites.

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