Yahoo! Is Bought by Chinese Communists
Are Google and Microsoft next?
Instapundit shares the scorn.
Roger Simon expresses righteous indignation:
I was about to go to sleep until I read this pathetic statement from Yahoo chief Jerry Yang excusing his company’s passing information to Chinese authorities which resulted in a ten-year prison sentence for journalist Shi Tao.
Yang, speaking at the Alibaba China Internet Summit here, also said he wasn’t happy with the 10-year sentence to journalist Shi Tao, jailed for passing on a government censorship order through his Yahoo e-mail account.
“We did not know what they wanted information for, we are not told what they look for, if they give us the proper documentation in a court order we give them things that satisfy local laws,” Yang told journalists
“I don’t like the outcome of what happened with this thing, we get a lot of these orders, but we have to comply with the law and that’s what we need to do.”
Oh, really? By the exact same logic, were Yahoo a German company in the 1940s and the state had asked it to send all their Jewish, Catholic, gypsy and gay employees to concentration camps for extermination, well, it would have been the local law and they would have had to have done so.
Sorry, Mr. Yang, you may be a billionaire, but you are not even the shadow of a moral human being. I suggest you have a look at Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience. You may have missed it in college.
Further:
If anyone has the power to confront this dark future and push it back, perhaps even more than governments, it is those three companies. So far they have not shown a willingess to do it.
Rebecca MacKinnon asks if global high-technology companies have ethical values:
When providing information and communications services in countries where political dissent is illegal, companies like Yahoo! need to ask themselves tough questions about whether they can realistically operate “within the laws, regulations and customs of the country in which they are based” while still upholding their ethical values. Assuming they have some. Even if they don’t, they must recognize that helping put dissidents in jail is pretty bad for the corporate image. Is the damage to Yahoo!’s reputation, credibility, and consumer trust really worth whatever money they’re making on that Chinese-language e-mail service?
I don’t think so.
The concepts of “freedom” and “civil disobedience” may make no sense in a Chinese context. I suggest a perusal of this interesting article, which asserts that, since the Chinese mega-states developed at a much earlier period and in a much more organized fashion than comparable European states, they were able to eradicate primitive notions of freedom at an early date.
Moreover, the claim is that the survival of the notion of “freedom” in the European states was essentially an anomaly based on the weakness of those very states. At a time when the political development of the Mediterranean consisted of nothing but isolated city-states, the Chinese Empire contained a massive and well-organized bureaucracy.
Chicago Boyz post this distressing look into the future. A very important read.
[Lee Kwan Yew] is saying that China can peacefully dominate its region in 50 years if it avoids confrontation with the USA, and that it plans to do so. However, the leadership may not be able to hold this quiet course for that long, because as China gets powerful over the next decade or two and nationalism is the only thing that will give the government legitimacy. He puts the period of danger at circa 2020-25.
History becomes inevitable only if we do nothing.
Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft are proficient at doing nothing it seems.
Their customers need to request they promote and project freedom. After all, we pay the salaries of these executives when we buy their products.
Our actions do have consequences — will we learn that?
UPDATE:
Daniel Drezner is keeping score.