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Censured for Censorship in China
Dwarg writes "On Aug. 10, [Human Rights Watch], headquartered in New York, came out with a report criticizing the three companies for their role helping to censor the Internet in China. The report is particularly damning of Yahoo, which Human Rights Watch says censors its Chinese site far more vigorously than either Google or Microsoft."
I'm sure the billions they rake in will more than soothe whatever conscience they have left.
I feel that free speech should be an absolute, even when it's harmful. To use the old saw I think that the damage of yelling 'Fire' in a crowded theatre is far less than the damage of allowing any kind of restrictions on free speech.
That being said, why berate Google, who's voluntarily filtering their own information, and not berate Cisco, who's designed and built a great deal of the routing equipment used by the PDRC government to filter and monitor internet traffic... the so called 'Great Firewall of China'?
I certainly don't care for Google's actions, but I think that Cisco's are just as heinous, if not worse than Yahoo's dissident incrimination.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Same deal with the Cambodians under Pol Pot. I mean, if they didn't like having their skulls stacked in neat piles, they should have left! Same deal with the Burmese. Am I right here or what? If they don't feel like overthrowing their yoke of oppression, I don't see why we should go out of our way to help them.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Don't you people get it? You looney libbies don't know when to stop biting the hand that feeds you, do you?
The only reason China is able to provide us with cheap goods and cheap labor is because of their ARM policies - analog rights management.
Look at American labor. It has become too expensive for our economy to keep growing. Do you want the Chinese people to have more freedoms and then lose their jobs like you lazy Americans do?
[free trade parody off]
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Everything except the following (in decreasing severity):
1. Some separatist propaganda and information (Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan). You will have to work hard to read epochtimes (an FLG propaganda site) in China.
2. Some FLG information.
3. Human rights organizations' web sites, which are concerned about points 1 and 2.
4. Tian'anmen incident.
5. Google is not censored, but using it triggers the cut-off mechanism all too easily (for no valid reason). I would recommend banning spiders from competing baidu.com on your own site until this unfair practice is mended.
6. A few select porn sites.
7. BBC World News (they are pissed at the BBC for some reason).
8. Occasionally Wikipedia, Blogspot (accessible as of today again) and other blog sites.
Normal surfers hardly ever note the presence of the great firewall, except when Blogspot is affected. Also note that there is no blocking of P2P and other services, and that you can get any information you want if you are determined to. The firewall is aimed at preventing the masses to get hold of sensitive information regarding Chinese politics. Which in itself is stupid, since those with access to the internet already know all about it, being the educated elite.
i guess the fundamental element in a business is that they want to make money. if the customers want some kind of ideology (whether you agree with it or not), then you'd better sell it to them. here in the US that means that they promote freedom (well, usually) of information but else where, those ideals are different.
you can't always decouple the symbiotic relationship between what's good for business and what's good for ideals. i think corporations might want to subscribe to Doing the Right Thing (DRT), but they'll only do it when they feel that they don't lose profits (taking into account that DRT might make them popular in some markets). for example, how is the US government going to tap phone wires w/o att's cooperation? how is att going to operate at all if the government doesn't give it the foundation it requires?
the problem that yahoo et al face is that because they are american based companies, they need to understand that american ideals relating to freedom of information are different than the ideals of the chinese government. the only way that western ideas about information will play a role in chinese (and other similar) markets, as far as profit margins are concerned, is if people who hold "western" ideals boycott these companies and thereby add some kind of "cost" to yahoo et al for them to want to censor information in china. hence reports like these.
the other solution would be for corporations to try to up hold some kind of motto like "do no evil" and try to convince themselves and others that somehow they are in the business for *more* than just profit. however, what do you do when these goals conflict? which criteria trumps the other? history has shown time and time again that for businesses when DRT is not profitable (and it rarely is)... profits (and usually the short term variety) dictate all decision making. DRT might be profitable in the short run if it wins you publicity, but given the short attention spans of people, DRT is probably never profitable in the long run.
and then, the nature of competition is that if you are willing to pay the monetary costs of DRT, your competitor might not be...
"What if some small European country put out a scathing report on how limiting
American speech is?"
Actually, we are a bit concerned (to say the least) about the freedom of speech in America. You are not doing too well on the freedom of press index, and having a state-run agency fine or censor nipples on TV is certainly not going to change that.
But America is America, the self-proclaimed moral leader of the world, the country in which 60% "don't believe" in evolution and where religion is as strong as ever in Iran or other countries currently on the shit list. Therefore, it might come to no one's surprise that America will try to set the standards in both directions, for instance when they pressed Japan to have stricter laws on pornography.
Putting a blogger in jail is not really helping the case either. Or having nearly 1% of your population in jail altogether (similar number for China is 0.2% btw).
Sorry for bashing a fundamentally good country, I am just concerned that if America doesn't get, that if America continues on this neo-religious, neo-moralistic, neo-fascist road, we will all be fucked in the end.
Wow. What crack smoking mod gave this Insightful?
Your argument boils down to: The US System isn't perfect -> We have no right to judge any human rights situation. Logically, that doesn't follow. It's a question of degree: of course the US system is not perfect, and we have a record of human rights abuses in our past and present. However, the American concept of free speech is immeasurably more "correct" than China's.
Their limits may be more restrictive than ours, but we *do* have restrictions.
Agreed, we do have restrictions. But you're taking the whole beam/mote debate to a new level entirely. If a parent lies on occasion, does he no longer have the "right" to tell his children not to lie? Do we expect perfection out of every moral goalpost.
Bottom line: We're never going to get perfection. We're (hopefully) going to to develop greater and greater respect for human rights. In the same way that perfect is the enemy of good, your relativistic judgment of the United States stands in the way of human rights progress in China. Just because I can't publish the DeCSS code in a newspaper doesn't imply that my country is on the same footing with one where reporters fear for their lives.
We should not assume the American system is best and that we should force our political
systems on others, that's how things like Iraq happen.
It may not be the best. But we must adopt a philosophy which holds "more human rights" to be better than "less human rights," and "more free speech" to be better than "less free speech."
I have discovered a truly marvelous
Yahoo! especially went beyond censorship. And that's disturbing because Google, MSN, etc. didn't.
The "Yahoo! was just playing by someone else's rules" argument fails. Unlike Yahoo!, Google managed to build a Chinese version of its search engine without handing data to the Chinese government that led to arrests.
Yahoo has not only censored information on its China-based web site but has also, actively, helped Beijing to arrest, imprison, and torture people who commit "thought crimes".
Yahoo's actions are understandable even if they cannot be condoned. Half of the team that established Yahoo is a Chinese from Taiwan. His name is Jerry Yang.
In Chinese society, people are mostly indifferent to human rights.
Yang simply steered his company along similar lines. He enthusiastically set up a joint venture with Alibaba, a Chinese company, long before Yahoo's competitors entered China.
The working atmosphere inside Yahoo reflects, to a certain extent, Chinese values. We Slashdotters may be concerned about human rights, but most employees within the walls of Yahoo just do not care. To them, Yahoo = 8 hours of daily work = paycheck. Whether a victim of Chinese brutality rots in a Beijing prison matters not a wit to the Yahoo employees.