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[weeklystandard.com...]
It's mostly about how Cisco is "working with" the Chinese government, but the remarks about Yahoo blocking sites specifically to satisfy the local governements is interesting.
Here are the interesting parts:
'Enter Yahoo! The business press has painted a picture of a thriving, home-grown Chinese market for portals and search engines--mirroring such companies as AOL, Google, and Excite--with names like Sohu, Netease, and Sina fighting for the top spots. Chinese Yahoo!, the American outrider, trails in fifth place. A top Yahoo! representative spoke to me on the condition that I would not use his name or give identifying details other than that he had recently left the company. He admitted that Yahoo! is actually the most popular portal in China by a mile. Management had fudged the hit rate, because "we were viewed as extremely aggressive. We were seen as too foreign." '
No doubt, all the Yanks will respond to this posting complaining about 'freedom of speech'.
I agree with you about the porn spammers. They should be drug out into the street and shot. I dont care about the free speech, generally we Americans take it for granted and use it as a crutch. I strongly think that there should be censorship of porn on the internet. Just today I got 5 porn emails and I think two of them were from yahoo email addresses. The children need to have some safe guard against the porn and it should be on the parents part, but sometimes the parents dont do it.
For a buck, corporate America and individuals will overlook any atrocity. Ask anyone about China's human rights policies and they will add their voice to the collective condemnation.
In the interest of serving their own greed, Yahoo has opted to overlook the fundamental force that drives the web. Freedom of information. Yahoo doesn't care that censorship, especially this type of censorship has no place on the web. It doesn't matter to Yahoo if the issue is black, white or grey as long as they see green.
I don't expect to see any public outcry about Yahoo's policy and I don't expect their position to change anytime soon.
You see, the veto power for Yahoo's policy doesn't exist in the hand of some corporate entity. The veto power is in the wallet of every person that decides where to make purchases and whether to pay for inclusion in their directory.
Paying lip service to the fundamental right of people to think and choose for themselves doesn't carry any weight.
What really scares me is who has access to the data that is collected on those unfortunates that actually commit a "thought crime."
The topic drift serves to show how much people really care about whether the people of China have access to free information or not. Censorship concern for most webmasters extends to placing a Blue Ribbon Campaign Freedom of Speech graphic on their website. If the people in free nations don't care, why should Yahoo?
DG - flames to /dev/null
U.S. Constitution
Project Gutenberg
Library of Congress
Smithsonian
Congressional records
The list is much longer than this but that gives you some idea. I've also been told that many students in China refuse to visit chat rooms for fear of slipping up and committing a "thought crime."
Activist groups still use human couriers to distribute messages and spread the word about meetings for fear that ALL their internet activity is reviewed and communications are read. And we thought we had Big Brother looking over our shoulders in the States...
DG
