Yahoo!`s Stand on Free Speech in China
What do you do when your principles and your options don't match? Yahoo! and the other major search engines are in that situation when they try to do business in China. Read about what brought Yahoo! to this state, and what it is trying to do about it.
For any American businessman who takes the values of his home country to heart, it must be a nightmare come to life. When the business itself can be seen as reflecting the highest of those values, accusations of betrayal—and worse—quickly follow. Yet it is exactly these waters that the major search engines must steer through every day, and in this case, that Yahoo! finds itself mired in concerning China.
To be sure, Yahoo! isn’t alone. Google took a lot of heat recently for finally caving in and agreeing to comply with China’s laws by censoring the search results of its China website. To be fair, it was the last major search engine to do so. But Google hasn’t yet had to deal with the mass of anger in the United States surrounding political arrests of Internet users in China that stemmed from the company simply obeying the law. Yahoo! has, and it hasn’t been pretty.
For those who haven’t heard, Yahoo! China in Beijing was required to provide information about a user. This user turned out to be Shi Tao, who was subsequently sentenced to 10 years in prison. His crime was “divulging state secrets abroad.” According to Reporters Without Borders, Shi Tao had sent “foreign-based websites the text of an internal message which the authorities had sent to his newspaper warning journalists of the dangers of social destabilization and risks resulting from the return of certain dissidents on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.”
This is information the Chinese government considered top secret—or at least, that’s what it claims. Shi Tao disputed that claim. You’d think that a government sending someone top secret information would at least label it as such so that there could be no disagreement over this point! Instead of China taking all of the heat for this, though, Yahoo! is taking a lot of it, as if its compliance with the law in China was some kind of appeasement policy. Those who maintain that point of view don’t have a good grasp of Yahoo!’s options, which are more limited than you might think. To understand this, it helps to look back in time a few years.
