Boston Globe Editorial: Flat Earth, tangled Web

January 15, 2006

(Clearwisdom.net) ON NEW Year's Eve, Microsoft shut down the website of Chinese dissident and journalist Zhao Jing. Writing under the nom-de-blog Michael An Ti, he had angered Chinese authorities by criticizing recent government-ordered firings of editors at a progressive Beijing newspaper. Microsoft said it agreed to pull the plug on Zhao out of respect for Chinese laws. But US technology companies doing business overseas cannot operate ethically while helping their host countries squelch human rights.

The vast, unruly Internet may pose more of a threat to repressive governments -- whether China, Burma, or Singapore -- than democracy protests or strikes. Already at least 100 million Chinese use the Internet, instantly spreading information that the government would rather suppress. In November, the Web was a convener -- and magnifier -- of public anger over the government's handling of a benzene chemical spill in the city of Harbin.

The government has tried to fight fire with fire, using sophisticated filtering software to block website references to ''prohibited language" such as the words Tibet, Tiananmen, or Falun Gong. The giant Cisco Systems has been sharply criticized for selling the filtering equipment to China, and Yahoo! Google News, Sun Microsystems, and other US firms are complicit in various ways in government censorship abroad.

Rebecca MacKinnon, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and a former CNN bureau chief in Beijing, says technology companies should voluntarily devise industry wide standards for operating in countries like China, presenting a more united front in resisting official attempts to control information. Still, she is not expecting US tech companies to walk away from the world's largest market. And the principles at stake go beyond China, anyway. ''We need to know where technology stands when it comes to the rights of users versus the demands of government," she said.

The advocacy group Reporters without Borders is circulating a petition asking Congress and the State Department to convene an effort to establish voluntary guidelines. The tech companies can join in or risk more burdensome legislation. Congressional hearings are set; it's no longer good enough for the companies to claim that their mere presence opens up repressive societies.

Until now, the corporate image of high-tech has been rather benign:

relatively pollution-free; offering decent work conditions; socially responsible. That may be changing.

By week's end, An Ti was back on line, blogging through a US host site, but still not available in China except through e-mails. ''It is so hard to be a free Chinese person," he wrote to his supporters. ''Damn Great Wall, damn Microsoft."