Syria wants the Internet to be available to every household in the country, said Bashar al-Assad, the heir to the Syrian presidency, this week. ?This is a field that should reach every household,?  he said after opening the first Syrian-Lebanese computer forum with a call to prepare for a future of technology. The country aims to attract investment into a large non-computerized market of 17 million people, in which there are currently only about 2,000 Internet accounts, due to access restrictions. Saadalla Agha al-Kalaa, spokesman of Syria’s non-governmental Computer Society, said a plan to upgrade infrastructure and allow individual subscribers access through private providers would be implemented by the end of 2000. ?Our computerization plan is centered on the education system, where all secondary schools now have computers,? he said, adding that preparatory schools would follow in two years.



Meanwhile, China has announced that it will regulate Net news but spice up its commercial Web sites to compete against other sites, extending its practice of pairing a restrictive government with a liberal economic model. China’s Internet Information Management Bureau worries about ?infiltration of harmful information on the Internet,? but it knows a good selling opportunity and will focus on ?making sleepy state-owned news sites more interesting, rather than reining in popular commercial sites.?What’s being filtered? Don’t worry, says the government: just the harmful stuff. Bureau head Wang Qingcun wants to protect China’s readers from ?false news, copyright violations, and neglect of the legal rights and interests of information providers.? But he said it wouldn’t censor, for example, the major news off a portal: ?If it’s true, it’s okay to report it.?