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Wired News has a jarring story this week about the perils facing Yahoo users in China. Anonymous bloggers who criticize the government and express pro-democracy views are being arrested, charged with "inciting subversion," convicted (sometimes based on evidence provided by Yahoo), and handed prison sentences of up to ten years. The bloggers who fall victim are viewed by the American-based company as unfortunate casualties of a sticky situation, in which Western Internet providers must abide by Chinese laws in order to do business in the country. Yahoo isn't alone - as Wired notes, Google's China search engine blocks access to sites the government deems objectionable, Microsoft's Chinese blogging service contains filters that prohibit words like "freedom" and "democracy" from blog titles, and Cisco supplies the internet equipment needed to create the country's so-called "Great Firewall" that blocks Chinese citizens from viewing websites about Tibet and Tiananmen Square. Still, Yahoo has long been fingered as the worst offender, facing continued charges of collaborating willingly with the Chinese government's Internet censorship and policing regulations after investing heavily in the country's e-commerce and web markets. In response, a Yahoo spokesman told Wired that the company is "strongly opposed to repression of free speech and is working to develop a set of operating principles to guide its engagement in countries with repressive governments" - but at the end of the day, Yahoo users are being arrested for using its product, and the Internet giant is responding by handing over evidence to convict them.
As always (particularly once the lawyers are called in), the issue isn't black and white - as Stanford Law Prof. Allen Weiner tells Wired, "when you're doing business in a foreign country, you're obligated to comply with the [country's] law," adding, "We may not like the law. But Yahoo is in a difficult position." Fair point, but come on now - is it too much to assume that a company whose product relies on supplying forums for the free dissemination of ideas and information should foresee issues like this in providing Internet services to non-democratic nations? And when situations like, say, the imprisonment of your customers and alleged violations of their human rights arise, is it unreasonable to expect that you'll turn all possible resources and energies towards coming up with a solution? Perhaps the most frightening part of Wired's report is the Yahoo spokesman's admission that he had never heard of the case of Wang Xiaoning (who was imprisoned in 2002 for distributing "prohibited" writings through his Yahoo e-mail account) until now, despite continued media coverage of the story over a span of several years. At some point, the line between legally-tied hands and indifference starts to look dangerously thin.
