Southwest News-Herald, Chicago: For Internet Companies Freedom Has a Price

February 17, 2006

Congressional hearings last week attempted to answer the question of why U.S. companies that benefit from our hard won freedoms are willing to be accomplices to repression in China.

While the media pondered the effect of Dick Cheney's hunting accident on Iran's nuclear buildup and the war on terror, representatives from four American technology giants -- Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco Systems, and Google -- attempted to defend themselves before a House International Relations subcommittee with being accessories to the oppression of the Chinese people by helping restrict access to the Internet -- and worse.

Lured by the profit potential of an estimated 100 million Chinese Internet users, U.S. technology companies have entered the Chinese market, justifying acceptance of mandated restrictions, such as censoring what search engines may retrieve using words like "freedom," "Tibet," Taiwan," "Falun Gong," etc. by saying that they are still giving the Chinese people more access to information than they ever had.

Google's Elliot Schrage testified that it decided to enter the Chinese market because it thought it "will make a meaningful, though imperfect, contribution to the overall expansion of access to information in China." Lawmakers of both parties weren't buying it. And neither am I.

If U.S. tech firms were merely complying with certain content restrictions, it would be bad enough, but they are apparently functioning as the eyes and ears of China's secret police. As the France-based free-speech advocate Reporters Without Borders (RSF) fumes on its Web site (www.rsf.org), "It is one thing to turn a blind eye to the Chinese government's abuses and it is quite another thing to collaborate."

If you try to access that site from a computer in Beijing, you get a blank page. Outside China, you would read that at least 50 Chinese citizens are behind bars for breaking the rules with their cyber-dissent, some imprisoned using information provided by U.S. companies. For example, political dissident Li Zhi, a 35-year-old ex-civil servant, was sentenced to eight years in prison in December 2003 based on electronic records provided by Yahoo.

Shi Tao, a reporter for Dangdai Shang Bao (Contemporary Business News) of Hunan sent via the Internet to foreign Web sites copies of the Chinese government's directives forbidding coverage of the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, RSF reports, citing Chinese court records, that a Yahoo subsidiary fingered Shi by handing Chinese authorities the digital fingerprints of Shi's e-mails, leading to the journalist's 10-year prison sentence.

Last Dec. 31, Microsoft shut down the popular blog site of Zhao Jing, written under the pseudonym Michael Anti, after he criticized the firing of a progressive Beijing newspaper editor.

Microsoft says it had to shut down the blog based on the "explicit government notification" it had received.

Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), who convened the hearings, said the companies are "enabling dictatorship," adding: "Cooperation with tyranny should not be embraced for the sake of tyranny," and has proposed legislation that would withhold computer servers from nations that use them and Internet technology to suppress human rights. The companies could still reach their Chinese customers with a little less response time and a lot less censorship.

One of the things that helped bring down the evil empire that was the Soviet Union was the inability of the Kremlin to control the flow of information to its people and the captive nations that wet their appetite for freedom. Facing a growing economic and military power in China, truth and freedom of information may be our ultimate weapon.

As long as companies like Google benefit from a free society, it should not be complicit in helping the Communist Chinese in suppressing freedom. The Chinese people should be permitted to seek out the truth, as American Internet users can and the truth will help them become free.