Yahoo agrees to Chinese censorship

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?



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