Sinobyte: China and technology

Yahoo China and MSN China both briefly posted a "most wanted" list with photos of people Chinese authorities are trying to track down surrounding the recent events in Tibet, a French TV website reports.

Rebecca MacKinnon reports that the lists were down when she checked, and offers a guess as to what happened:

I wouldn't be surprised if the local editors just automatically ran it because everybody else in China was running it, then got over-ridden by management in the U.S. who realized how badly this would play outside of China... Such is the disconnect between China and the West on the Tibet issue.

Yahoo has an especially public history of aiding Chinese authorities in a much more proactive way, most famously in the Shi Tao case, when Yahoo gave authorities identifying information about online comments led to Shi Tao's imprisonment. Yahoo has scarcely heard the end of that, and its representatives, as well as some from Microsoft, have been called before U.S. Congressional committees. (Now the company's blog has called for Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to push for his release.)

Wherever you stand on these issues of cooperation with law enforcement, companies would be wise to think before they post.

UPDATE: Xinhua reports that portals including Yahoo had published the material.

Microsoft is not a beacon of free expression in the face of China's government restrictions on online speech. But in a talk at Stanford, he said no one can control free expression on the web.

"I don't see any risk in the world at large that someone will restrict free content flow on the Internet," Gates said, according to IDC news service. "You cannot control the Internet."

As the article notes, Microsoft has been complicit in Chinese censorship. In the most high-profile case, the company shut down a blog by Michael Anti, a blogger who the authorities responsible for internet restrictions had noticed. Rebecca MacKinnon, a blogger and professor at Hong Kong University, has outlined how a Microsoft site banned certain sensitive terms in Chinese. (See this post among many others.)

Yahoo, which may become the newest, most famous member of the Microsoft Corp. family, has also cooperated with Chinese authorities in efforts to restrict online expression. To free speech advocates, Gates' comment may seem like a positive element. But I don't expect advocates to give Gates and his company a pass on past cooperation.

IDC writes:

It will be driven by business requirements. Restrictions on free speech will curtail business activity, and so commercial forces will work against censorship, Gates said. "If your country wants to have a developed economy ... you basically have to open up the Internet," he said.

These comments frankly strike me as empty words. As much as many idealists would like to believe that free speech is required to be "developed," I would need to see evidence supporting this correlation to get on board. Meanwhile, actions speak louder than words. Both Microsoft and Yahoo have acted in a way that indicates their economic development in China is worth cooperating with policies Gates apparently doesn't see as sustainable.

If Gates believes that free speech is good, and that it will inevitably prevail, I wonder how he feels about participating in filtering in the meantime. An alert Stanford student would have asked him, and if someone did, an alert reporter would have mentioned what he said. If he says you "cannot control the Internet," we can be forgiven for noting that his company helps people try.

"According to Zaobao.com, Beijing has intervened into Microsoft's acquisition of Yahoo by asking Chinese online e-commerce service provider Alibaba to provide detailed information on the acquisition and by keeping a close watch on the process of the acquisition as well as its possible influence," writes ChinaTechNews.com.

Chinese authorities have an interest in the deal partly because Yahoo is a major shareholder of Alibaba, a major online marketplace where manufacturers find customers.

From The Times of London:

A former Chinese university professor who was dismissed after he founded a democratic opposition party, plans to sue Yahoo and Google in the United States for blocking his name from search results in China.

Guo Quan, an expert on classical Chinese literature and the 1937 Nanjing massacre of Chinese civilians by Japanese troops, last week issued an open letter pledging to bring a lawsuit against Google after he discovered that his name had been excised in searches of its Google.cn portal in China.

He told The Times that he had now found that the Chinese Yahoo site had also blocked his name and that he planned to bring actions against both companies. "Since January 1, a lot of friends told me that Web sites with my name had been closed. They told me it's impossible to search for my information on Google and Yahoo."

I won't pretend to be a lawyer, but it seems unlikely that Guo will be successful. He acknowledges that there's no chance in Chinese court, but it would be interesting if he succeeds in bringing a suit against the companies in U.S. court.

See The Times' full article, "Dissident Chinese professor to sue Yahoo! and Google for erasing his name." Hat tip goes to Techdirt.