In your view was Yahoo right or wrong to assist Chinese authorities? What would
ID: 467600 • Letter: I
Question
In your view was Yahoo right or wrong to assist Chinese authorities? What would you have done–and why–if you were in charge of Yahoo? (350-400 word reply)
This part of textbook should be used to answer this question:
Yahoo in China
SHI TAO IS A THIRTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD CHINESE journalist and democracy advocate. Arrested for leaking state secrets in 2005, he was sentenced to ten years in prison. His crime? Mr. Shi had disclosed that the Communist Party’s pro- paganda department had ordered tight controls for handling the anniversary of the infamous June 4, 1989, crackdown on demonstrators in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. A sad story, for sure, but it’s an all too familiar one, given China’s notoriously poor record on human rights. What makes Mr. Shi’s case stand out, however, is the fact that he was arrested and convicted only because the American company Yahoo revealed his identity to Chinese authorities.83
You see, Mr. Shi had posted his information anonymously on a Chinese-language website called Democracy Forum, which is based in New York. Chinese journalists say that Shi’s informa- tion, which revealed only routine instructions on how officials were to dampen possible protests, was already widely circulated. Still, the Chinese government’s elite State Security Bureau wanted to put its hands on the culprit behind the anonymous posting. And for that it needed Yahoo’s help in tracking down the Internet address from which huoyan1989@yahoo.com.cn had accessed his e-mail. This turned out to be a computer in Mr. Shi’s workplace, Contemporary Business News in Changsha, China.
A few months after Shi’s conviction, the watchdog group Reporters Without Borders revealed the story of Yahoo’s involvement and embroiled the company in a squall of controversy. After initially declining to comment on the alle- gation, Yahoo eventually admitted that it had helped Chinese authorities catch Mr. Shi and that it had supplied information on other customers as well. But the company claimed that it had no choice, that the information was provided as part of a “legal process,” and that the company is obliged to obey the laws of any country in which it operates. Yahoo co-founder, Jerry Yang, said: “I do not like the outcome of what happens with these things . . . but we have to comply with the law. That’s what you need to do in business.”
Some critics immediately spied a technical flaw in that argu- ment: The information on Mr. Shi was provided by Yahoo’s sub- sidiary in Hong Kong, which has an independent judiciary and a legal process separate from that of mainland China. Hong Kong legislation does not spell out what e-mail service providers must do when presented with a court order by mainland author- ities. Commentators pointed out, however, that even if Yahoo was legally obliged to reveal the information, there was a deeper question of principle involved. As the Financial Times put it in an editorial: “As a general principle, companies choosing to operate in a country should be prepared to obey its laws. When those laws are so reprehensible that conforming to them would be unethical, they should be ready to withdraw from that market.” Congressional representative Christopher H. Smith, a New Jersey Republican and chair of a House subcommittee on human rights, was even blunter: “This is about accommodating a dictatorship. It’s outrageous to be complicit in cracking down on dissenters.” And in an open letter to Jerry Yang, the Chinese dissident Liu Xiabo, who has himself suffered censorship, imprisonment, and other indignities, wrote: “I must tell you that my indignation at and contempt for you and your company are not a bit less than my indignation and contempt for the Communist regime. . . . Profit makes you dull in morality. Did it ever occur to you that it is a shame for you to be considered a traitor to your customer Shi Tao?”
Whether profit is dulling their morality is an issue that must be confronted not just by Yahoo but also by other Internet- related companies doing business in China. Microsoft, for exam- ple, recently shut down the MSN Spaces website of a popular Beijing blogger whose postings had run afoul of censors. Google agreed to apply the Chinese censors’ blacklist to its new Chinese search engine. And a congressional investigative committee has accused Google, Yahoo, and Cisco of helping to maintain in China “the most sophisticated Internet control system in the world.” In their defense, the companies ask what good it would do for them to pull out of the Chinese market. They contend that if they resist the Chinese government and their operations are closed down or if they choose to leave the country for moral reasons, they would only deny to ordinary Chinese whatever fresh air the Internet, even filtered and censored, can provide in a closed society. It’s more important for them to stay there, play ball with the govern- ment, and do what they can to push for Internet freedom. As Yahoo chairman Terry S. Semel puts it: “Part of our role in any form of media is to get whatever we can into those countries and to show and to enable people, slowly, to see the Western way and what our culture is like, and to learn.” But critics wonder what these companies, when they are complicit in political repression, are teaching the Chinese about American values.
Some tech companies are turning to the U.S. government for help. Bill Gates, for example, thinks that legislation making it illegal for American companies to assist in the violation of human rights overseas would help. A carefully crafted American anti-repression law would give Yahoo an answer the next time Chinese officials demand evidence against cyber-dissidents. We want to obey your laws, Yahoo officials could say, but our hands are tied; we can’t break American law. The assumption is that China would have no choice but to accept this because it does not want to forgo the advantages of having U.S. tech companies operating there.
Still, this doesn’t answer the underlying moral questions. At a November 2007 congressional hearing, however, a number of lawmakers made their own moral views perfectly clear. They lambasted Yahoo, describing the company as “spineless and irresponsible” and “moral pygmies.” In response, Jerry Yang apologized to the mother of Shi Tao, who attended the hearing. Still, Yahoo has its defenders. Robert Reich, for instance, argues that “Yahoo! is not a moral entity” and “its executives have only one responsibility . . . to make money for their shareholders and, along the way, satisfy their consumers.” And in this case, he thinks, the key “consumer” is the Chinese government.
Update
How to deal with China continues to confound American Internet companies. In 2010, upset by the hacking of its servers by the Chinese government, which was trying to gain information about dissidents, and uneasy about continuing its complicity in Internet censorship, Google closed its mainland-based search engine, automatically redirecting searches to its Hong Kong affiliate. Hong Kong has an independent legal system, and mainland Chinese censorship laws do not apply there. After further pressure from the Chinese government, Google replaced its automatic redirect from Google China to Google Hong Kong with a link to the latter. However, the connection breaks if users search for terms that the Chinese government considers politically sensitive—including such seemingly innocuous phrases as ying di, the Chinese word for “best actor,” which might be used to refer to the Chinese pre- mier, Li Keqiang. When Google tried to fight this by introducing a feature that warned users that their search term could break their connection to Google, Chinese authorities disabled the feature. After a long cat-and-mouse struggle in which Google kept modify- ing the feature and the authorities kept cutting off Chinese users, Google finally threw in the towel at the end of 2012 and gave up trying to warn its Chinese users about sensitive search terms.
Explanation / Answer
In my view, Yahoo was wrong to assist chinese authorities. Internet companies such as Yahoo, Microsoft, Google have a business model which is driven by online users of their services. These internet companies have complete access to their users’ information. Users come to these sites mostly for search purpose. There’s a degree of privacy protection and confidentiality that users expect when they transact for information on such websites. Because of this implicit trust, it is the fiduciary duty of companies like Yahoo to uphold the privacy of their users. However Yahoo succumbed to political pressure in the interest of its own business to compromise the identity of its user, Shi Tao. It is a gross misappropriation of the trust that Shi Tao imposed in Yahoo while using its platform to air his views.
Yahoo decided to meekly submit to the pressures of chinese government’s dictatorial and repressive policies, and instead of standing up for the human rights and taking a firm stand to fight, it decided to protect its own business interests by resorting to unethical means. Terming this action of Yahoo as correct, co-founder Jerry Yang, citing the compliance to local laws of utmost importance for business at any cost of ethical violations, displayed an opportunism of highest order.
In such an environment, as in china, it would not have been possible for Jerry Yang to create a Yahoo. It is only because of the creative freedom that people enjoy in countries that stand up for human rights, that new things are created and new ideas prosper. Instead of supporting a dictatorial repressive regime that censors the freedom of speech of its people and forces companies to be complicit with them in their efforts, big companies such as Yahoo, Google, Microsoft should instead blacklist countries like China for providing their services.
Yahoo’s argument that it is providing at least some level of internet freedom to chinese users by continuing to do business in China, is a shallow one. Such half hearted measures do more harm than good to the cause. If I were in charge of Yahoo, I would have fought against the repressive policies of Chinese communist regime. Instead of being complicit with them and punish an innocent user, whose only fault was that he chose to speak the truth, I would have stood up for Shi Tao and would have used the platform to share across the world the stories of blatant human rights violation happening in mainland china. Even if the consequences were to pull out of that market, I would have stood up for what is ethically right.