I’ve not really been following this, to be honest but this story just doesn’t feel right to me: Yahoo helped jail China writer. The ‘China writer’ has been sentenced to 10 years because ‘he was found guilty of sending foreign-based websites the text of an internal Communist Party message’. Christ almighty! That must sit very uneasily with the conciences of those in the Yahoo boardroom.
And they’re not alone. If I remember correctly, Google allows the Chinese government to limit their search results and Microsoft also censor their MSN Spaces blogging service.
I suppose everyone has to decide where to draw the line and for Yahoo it was at the $1 billion mark. I don’t know how much the others cost.
Now, there are a couple of things that spring to mind, beyond the moral issue.
Firstly, I don’t understand how the Chinese government can do all this, technically. The resources they’re pouring in must be enormous.
Secondly, censorship destroys the single greatest (and worst) thing about the internet - there is information for everyone out there, no matter what they’re into. Working at Wordtracker has given me an insight into what people are looking for on the internet, and while most of it is legit, some of it really, deeply disturbing… And I’m quite laissez faire. Still, the internet, at its heart, is about putting folk in touch with other like-minded people. Without that, how much benefit do the Chinese people really get from the digital revolution that has changed the lives of so many?
Anyway, over at Wordtracker we call it ‘online behaviour’ and it’s a facinating step into cyber-sociology. The internet takes up so much of so many peoples’ lives but we know so little about what’s actually going on. I guess the Chinese have realised that and have developed the world’s first cyber-dictatorship.
