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IP: Yahoo agrees to Chinese censorship
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 14:35:20 -0400
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34015-2002Aug18.html washingtonpost.com Yahoo's China Concession Monday, August 19, 2002; Page A12 TWO YEARS ago, when cyberprophets were riding high, a group of anti-Nazi activists in France had the temerity to sue Yahoo. The suit complained that French Web surfers could buy Nazi paraphernalia on Yahoo's Web site and that this violated the anti-Nazi laws that were supposed to bind French citizens.
From its Silicon Valley headquarters, Yahoo let out a high-tech guffaw. The
Internet is borderless; national regulation can't apply; if it did, Web companies would suddenly have to respect the law of every country whose citizens might browse their Web sites. "It is very difficult to do business if you have to wake up every day and say, okay, whose laws do I follow?" said Heather Killen, Yahoo's senior vice president of international operations. Things have changed out there in the valley. The aspiration to a borderless Internet has fizzled along with technology stock prices. Commercial Web sites are eagerly recreating real-space national boundaries in cyberspace, so that they run Japanese ads for people who log on in Japan and German ones for Germans. National regulators are tightening control, asserting their right to tax e-commerce sites in their countries and the right to "wiretap" e-mail with suspected criminal connections. For the most part, this is good: There's no reason why societies that choose to ban child pornography in real space should decide that the same material in cyberspace is fine, or why bricks-and-mortar stores should pay sales taxes while clicks-and-mortar stores escape them. But this principle can sometimes go too far. It's ironic that the latest company to cross the line is none other than Yahoo. Yahoo has recently signed a voluntary pledge to purge its Chinese Web site of material that China's communist dictatorship might deem subversive. Yahoo promises to avoid "producing, posting or disseminating pernicious information that may jeopardize state security and disrupt social stability." It pledges to monitor information posted by users on its site and to "remove the harmful information promptly." It even undertakes to avoid offering links to sites whose content might not be "healthy." In sum, Yahoo is promising to become part of the regime's strategy: Allow the Internet to spread so that China reaps its commercial potential, but prevent it from nurturing free expression. Yahoo says that it is obliged to follow local law and that the voluntary pledge does not add much to what Chinese law requires anyway. It points out that the French suit targeted Yahoo's American Web site, which is different from China's policy of squeezing Chinese-based Internet operations. But both cases involve countries trying to enforce domestic law, and it's strange that Yahoo cooperates more eagerly with China's dictators than it does with a European democracy. If the firm actually does the things the pledge implies, it may become complicit in the oppression of Chinese whose crime is to have a political idea or to espouse an unpopular religion. Internet cafes in China already are required to report clients' visits to subversive sites, and Chinese who have copied material from these sites have been hit with long prison sentences. Does Yahoo, a firm whose cheeky name evokes the wacky freedom of the Internet, really want to be a part of this? For archives see: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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