Yahoo’s China Problem

Today, we learn Yahoo! Hong Kong provided materials from of one of its users, including a draft e-mail he stored on a Yahoo! server, to a Beijing tribunal that led to his imprisonment.

This is immoral and wrong, plain and simple. Let's not tolerate any nonsense from Terry Semel or other Yahoos that they did this because they have to comply with local Chinese laws.

They have choices, including these two options:

1. Just say no. Have they tried that?

2. Stop offering services that can potentially entrap their users — users, by the way, who are being imprisoned just for committing their opinions to 0s and 1s stored on Yahoo servers. Stop providing services that can be traced to an individual, or that require any personally identifiable information, and that will ultimately be used by the Chinese government to hunt down dissenting voices and to put them away. Google, while it doesn't have totally clean hands, has effectively made this decision.

If Yahoo! doesn't take a firm step here, I'd support action by the government (the US government) to force it and other US-based companies to change behaviors. No more selling technologies that help build the Great Wall. No more provisioning of services that can serve as the handmaiden to the Chinese government investigative agencies.

Interested to hear what Yahoo! says about this. My cynical prediction: more of the same, it's not our fault, we have to comply with local laws, blah blah blah. As I've written before, an argument made by IBM, in the 1930s (and for decades afterwards), to justify their work compiling lists of Jews for the Nazis with their then-newfangled machines. Yes, this isn't of the same magnitude, but it's damned close on the continuum, and Yahoo (and its employees, all of them) should be ashamed.

China, GYM, and Stephen Colbert

How do I lump these three things together? Truthiness. Let me explain.

I’ve been trying to figure out where I stand on Google’s entry into China (and have written about similar dilemnas and my personal experience in China here and here). My initial gut instinct was that Google was wrong to do this, particularly in light of their “do no evil” aspirations. But I found the very adult commentary from both Doc Searls and Dr. Weinberberger (whose writings I admire but neither of whom I know personally) on this topic compelling. So I thought about it some more.

Their position is also advanced today by Bill Gates.

The essential argument from Searls, Weinberger, Gates and probably Sergey Brin is this: the world is a messy place, we are continually faced with difficult moral dilemnas for which there are rarely perfectly moral answers, and on balance engagement with China is better than the alternatives. More specifically, both Gates and Brin would probably argue this particular form of engagement is likely to increase, not decrease, the amount and scope of information available to Chinese internet users.

But then there is this. The reality does not meet the rhetoric or our hopes. If you are in China, you still can’t search about Falun Gong, Tiannamen Square, Tibet or Taiwan with any hope of really getting something that is objectively close to the truth. Nor can you expect to write about those subjects truthfully. The government simply won’t allow that to happen. Indeed, Google, Yahoo! and MSN have all complied with the Chinese government’s request to ensure that you can’t do this. And other folks like Cisco have worked hard to help them built the Great Wall in case those guys don’t filter things out.

Which leads us to truthiness. With these types of bargains with folks like MSN, Yahoo and Google, the Chinese government can continue to argue and proclaim they are “liberalizing” and inreasing the openness of their society. And Yahoo!, Google and MSN can argue that they are not doing something immoral, or wrong, but that instead that they’re helping to open up China and Chinese society by “engaging.” They all — the Chinese government and GYM –
get to engage in some truthiness. The appeal and logic of “engagement”
seems and feels true — so long as you ignore the reality and the facts. The facts are that GYM are providing services and technology that help the Chinese government
restrict and repress free speech, especially political speech. Which makes this example of truthiness that much more delicious — because they all essentially argue that by abetting in repression in the short-term they’ll liberate in the long-run!

The world is complex and full of moral mixed outcomes, but there must remain things we won’t do — even for vast sums of money. As I’ve asked before, what would we make of now of IBM arguing that their engagement with Nazi Germany in the 1930s was proper? In this particular case, I am increasingly of the opinion that GYM and Cisco have crossed the line. But like Searls and Weinberger, I could be wrong.

China, Blogging, Censorship

Rebecca MacKinnon, Dave Weinberger and Robert Scoble provide a great public service today. MacKinnon first and most importantly with her post on Michael Anti (Zhao Jing), and Weinberger and Scoble with their follow posts to bring the issue more public attention (I saw it first on Weinberger this morning, and then again on scoble through memeorandum, leading ultimately to MacKinnon). These posts are evidence of how blogs can actually be good and useful and important (I’ve been a skeptic in the past; posts about important issues, written with authority and passion, like these three cause me to revisit that skepticism).

We don’t know all of the specifics yet about this case, but I think the latter half of MacKinnon’s post about her tests of Chinese language blogging tools is as troubling as this specific report about Michael Anti’s blog. I wrote last fall about this issue more broadly, and have been surprised there was less reaction to Yahoo’s actions last fall (and other companies, like Cisco, I might add).

I have some limited personal experience and opinion to bring to the dialog. When I headed up Real’s international consumer business in 2002-04, I travelled often to China, and spent a lot of time talking with friends and colleagues there about the potential censorship of our services (it was clear the Chinese authorities would not let us bring in streams from CNN and BBC, for example).

Whenever I broached the censorship topic, my young Chinese friends would tease me about my paternalistic ways, and never hesitated to remind me about my own government’s alleged human rights abuses (our captives at Guantanamo Bay being exhibit A at the time). They would also tell me how it was easy to find Tianammen Square massacre video, or other anti-government video, on the Internet (none was so brazen as to actually show me), and not to worry so much about censorship. These were smart, thoughtful, independent, well-educated people, some of them “Sea Turtles” — American citizens either Chinese born or of Chinese descent, returning to China — who lived there full time and just didn’t seem as worried as I was about the issue.

In the end, I didn’t have to confront the ethical and moral issues personally — I was let off the hook. Real decided not to invest as much in our efforts there as I wanted at that time, and the things we looked at were in music and games. It would be easy for me now to claim I would have made the right decision; I personally felt the powerful lure of that market, and understand why western firms are so intent on getting a beachhead there.

But ultimately, I do believe there are universal principles and human rights at stake, and freedom of speech is without a doubt one of them. While I personally understand the lure of the Chinese market, and appreciate the advice from my friends there not to behave paternalistically towards them, it’s just wrong for us to use digital tools, technologies, and inventions we’ve created to help the Chinese government censor speech of individuals, especially political speech. We have export restrictions on many technologies, including most importantly armaments. Why not also make it illegal to export technologies that enable governments to censor the speech of their citizens?

I “get” that others will fill the void (perhaps Europeans, ever willing to court the Chinese, perhaps other Asian countries, perhaps even local Chinese companies). But isn’t this an issue where we should be on the side of the people (generally, as a people and government), and not on the side of shareholders of Cisco, MSFT, YHOO, and maybe GOOG?