The Chinese finger trick
Apparently Yahoo has fingered another Chinese dissident. Jiang Lijun was sentenced to 4 years in prison for subversive activities. The proof was a draft email that Yahoo turned over to the Chinese government. This is the third time that Yahoo has fingered a dissident to the government.
They are hardly the only Internet company to cooperate with another government's political quirks. EBay and Yahoo both block the sale of Nazi war memorabilia at the request of the French and German governments. Google blocks certain dissident sites from searching by Chinese users. Most Internet companies are reputed to cooperate whole-heartedly with American intelligence agencies, providing not only information on request, but even, in some cases, dedicated and highly secret backdoors to the logs.
It's time to stop thinking of Internet companies as Mom and Pop shops, startups or even good guys. They're multinational big businesses like General Motors, IBM or Michael Jackson. This loftiness is inevitable and if you're an investor, desirable.
But there's two ways that a company like that can go--they can either set their own culture above any one nations's and be master of their own fate or they can be the cumulative ethical sum of every major trading partners' value systems, no better than the intersection point of everyone that they do business with.
I commend Microsoft for having been the former. They stuck to their guns on their own imperialistic agenda, regardless of antitrust laws around the world. But the new guys in town? They're rolling over faster than Paris Hilton making a home movie.
Posted on April 20, 2006
