caving into Chinese Censors

Diane Francis, Financial Post
Published: Saturday, February 11, 2006

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - A Congressional hearing next week into the activities of three of the world's biggest public companies is of more than just passing interest to Harvard's Rebecca MacKinnon.

A former CNN bureau chief in Beijing and fluent in Mandarin Chinese, Ms. MacKinnon is hopping mad at Google Inc, Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. for all caving in to China's censors. She has been the most outspoken critic of these companies and has singlehandedly helped bring Congressional attention to the issue.

"The fact is that every time a multi-national corporation goes in and agrees to build censorship into their business model, as these [three] companies have done, it is easier for dictatorships to exist and easier to transfer censorship to other parts of the world," she said in an interview this week at the Berkman Center on Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

The Congressional hearing, starting Wednesday, promises to be one of the biggest business stories this year. Republican Chris Smith of New Jersey, chair of the subcommittee on Human Rights, will ask corporate officials to testify to determine whether U.S. laws have been broken, bent or should be changed to avert future complicity.

The issue came to a head last month when Google agreed to curb Internet searches in China on pro-democracy issues. (At the same time, it is fighting Washington's request to help it curb child pornography on the Internet.) "There are three separate cases involved here," said Ms. MacKinnon, who co-founded "Global Voices," which publishes bloggers in oppressed countries.

The most extreme involves Yahoo and a Chinese journalist who was using the search engine's e-mail service to send material to a dissident Web site in the United States. Chinese police traced the content back to the journalist's e-mail address and approached Yahoo.

"They asked Yahoo to hand over his account information and the company did," she said. "The man is now in jail."
Yahoo said that because its computers, containing account information, were physically in China, they had no choice but to comply.

"This is irresponsible," Ms. MacKinnon said. "If some government goon scared their Chinese employees, they do not have to comply even under Chinese law. Such requests have to go through proper channels, the chain of command and the state has to sign off. It's not true that there was no recourse except to hand over the account information."

Microsoft also ran afoul of China last year. The government complained to the company about access to a pro-democracy blog it offered users. Microsoft agreed to erase the blog.

"Microsoft's servers [computer equipment] are not even in China; they are in the U.S. So exactly what American law did this blogger break? Besides that, his blog was erased worldwide not just in China," she said.

After a hue and cry about the incident, Microsoft announced that it had revamped its software so that, in future, if a Web site or blog is erased in China, it won't be erased everywhere else.

Ms. MacKinnon thinks this makes matters worse. "By creating a more sophisticated and more finely grained system of censorship, Microsoft will still be instituting a workable model, which can be applied to China, Zimbabwe, Tunisia, Iran or wherever a government is cracking down," she said. "And who says this can't be applied here or Canada or Australia? This is the thin edge of the wedge."

Google's case is different from the others. At the end of 2005, it agreed, at the request of the Chinese government, to restrict searches by Chinese users. Certain words, such as democracy or freedom, won't be searchable within China and certain Web sites or blogs will not be accessible. Ms. MacKinnon wants Google to be forced to publish its Chinese-approved list of "forbidden" words and sites.

Google says the agreement it reached with China is that Chinese users trying to access these words or sites will be told that they are unavailable by government request -- a form of disclosure and transparency that it maintains will indirectly advance democracy and information.

Clearly, the China issue is complex and has legs politically and financially. There is also plenty of investor grumbling, along with serious political fallout. Google, a stock market darling, has lost its lustre since news broke about its compliance with China and non-compliance with Washington. It's been doubly embarrassing for the company given its "do no evil" motto, say Ms. MacKinnon and other critics.

Microsoft's compliance has also embarrassed Microsoft's global philanthropist and do-gooder Bill Gates, who waxes often about the importance of spreading democracy and the rule of law in order to underpin free enterprise and planetary prosperity. Worst of all, however, is the negative publicity concerning Yahoo, which calls itself a media company but helped hunt down a democratic journalist, now rotting in a Chinese jail.

Corporate defenders say these companies had no choice. But that's hard to believe, given the economic leverage that the United States has together with China's overriding need to create 55,000 jobs a day just to keep employment level.

Whatever the excuses, these companies' actions certainly leave a bad taste.

© National Post 2006