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By Steven Levy
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Rep. Tom Lantos, a California Democrat and Holocaust survivor, had a message to Yahoo, Microsoft and Google at a public briefing last week: "These massively successful high-tech companies... should be ashamed." He was speaking of the way these Internet giants are cooperating with the Chinese government to stifle free speech. Google recently launched a China-based search engine with built-in censorship of critical political content, news sites and information about democracy. At Chinese insistence, Microsoft (which also filters by Chinese rules) has also shut down the blog of a dissident urging democracy. And Yahoo (yet another search censor) apparently provided information to China that helped it identify a journalist writing anonymously about human-rights abuses; the man is now serving 10 years in jail for this "crime."
From some frank discussions I've had with people at some of these companies, I think they are ashamed. But they believe that they have no alternative. With 130 million users, China is behind only the United States in Internet use, and soon will attain the top post--by far. For Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, ignoring China is unthinkable. But unless they join that government in making the Internet conform to its repressive agenda--an effort known as the Great Firewall of China--the companies cannot attain licenses to do business there.
The businesses know that building censorship into their search engines (and helping to stifle heroic dissidents) violates their principles, but, as Google says in a statement, "our continued engagement with China is the best (and perhaps only) way for Google to help bring the tremendous benefits of universal access to all our users there." Google--the company that set for itself a "don't be evil" standard--seems to have crunched the numbers and concluded that its participation, even if it means some censoring, registers lower on the scale of evildoing. This puts Google in pretty much the same relativistic philosophical boat as Microsoft. "One could walk away," says Brad Smith, Microsoft's chief counsel. "But that would also be turning our back on the problem." (Yahoo joined Microsoft in a statement that says, "... our services have promoted personal expression and enabled far wider access to independent sources of information for hundreds of millions of individuals in China and elsewhere in the world.")
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Critics scoff at this stance. "There's no evidence that Google and the others are providing any more information [to users] than Chinese companies," says Amy O'Meara of Amnesty International. In addition, say human-rights activists, when an American company agrees to filter political content at the request of the government, it lends an unearned sense of legitimacy to a morally repugnant act. "I think it's all about profits," says Rep. Chris Smith (Republican of New Jersey). "They say it's about openness, but they have an obligation not to promote dictatorships."
How can that obligation be met? There's an emerging consensus that companies need to work together--preferably, with the participation of human-rights groups and the U.S. government--to endorse limitations on their own behavior when it comes to helping China repress its citizens. This could be bolstered by legislation similar to rules that ban bribery in international contracts. That way, companies could refuse to perform onerous practices on the ground that their hands are tied.
That won't really solve the basic problem: the biggest country in the world wants to put shackles on the Internet. But it might spare us the spectacle of our brightest corporations' trying to rationalize behavior that is, undeniably, shameful.
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