...Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako said that her company had 'only responded with what we were legally compelled to provide, and nothing more' in such legal cases in China. Osako said she could not comment on the details of 34-year-old Li's case. 'We are unaware of this case and are currently looking into the matter,' she told Deutsche Presse-Agentur by telephone.

'We were rigorous in our procedures and made sure that only the required material was provided,' Osako said of Yahoo's operations in China, which have been handled by Chinese firm Alibaba since October last year.

'Governments are not required to inform service providers why they are seeking certain information, and typically do not do so,' she said.

Reporters without Borders is having none of it:

'We were sure the case of Shi Tao, who was jailed for 10 years last April on the basis of Yahoo-supplied data, was not the only one,' the group said. 'Now we know Yahoo works regularly and efficiently with the Chinese police.'

The firm says it simply responds to requests from the authorities for data without ever knowing what it will be used for. But this argument no longer holds water. Yahoo certainly knew it was helping to arrest political dissidents and journalists, not just ordinary criminals. The company must answer for what it is doing at the US congressional hearing set for February 15.

Not surprisingly, Yahoo is falling back on a variant of the same "lesser of two evils" argument that Google used:

Osako said that aspects of Shi's case were 'distressing to Yahoo', but that the company sometimes had to 'comply with laws that are not necessarily consistent with our values'.

'We pride ourselves on helping citizens around the world to communicate with each other,' she said. 'We fundamentally believe that the Internet is a positive force in China.'

In other words, while Yahoo sometimes does things it finds "distressing", they believe their presence is, on the whole, much more beneficial than not.

While the parallels between Yahoo's and Google's actions in China are quite obvious, none of the commentary I have seen mentions that Yahoo was also asked to crack down on child pornogrpahy in the US and that, unlike Google, it complied. Last fall, in one of the first few entries on this blog, I wrote the following:

I just saw this announcement in the Chicago Tribune, via Bloomberg News,

"Yahoo Bans Internet Chat Rooms Promoting Sex With Minors Yahoo! Inc. has removed 70,000 user- created Internet chat rooms and will bar chat rooms that promote sex with minors, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said in a statement today. The agreement follows investigations begun earlier this year by Spitzer's office and the office of Nebraska's attorney general, Jon Bruning, the statement said. The investigations were prompted by tips that children had access to sexually explicit adult chat rooms, the statement said."

The first thing that came to my mind when I read this article was "great". The second thing I wondered why this Bay Area-based company needed the New York State Attorney General to push them into doing this. Given how widely reviled are all things involving sex between minors and adults, it is hard to imagine that Yahoo was pleased about these forums. My guess is that they probably already wanted to shut down these sites earlier but wanted cover. That is to say, they wanted this done but didn't want to take the heat for censoring their customers speech and monitoring their online activites. Eliot's motivations are crystal clear- he's got a higher office in his sights and being seen tough on child pornography will undoubtedly help him with family values oriented swing voters.

Although I am pleased that Yahoo banned these chat rooms, maybe this is a distinction without a difference. They complied in a situation similar, but not identical, to one where Google resisted. Either way, neither seems to be willing or able to move against the purveyors of the most loathsome of all forms of pornography. Neither seems to place any principle above profit, to stand for anything other than short-term corporate self interest.

Access to the world's largest IT and internet market comes at a cost. Ultimately the members of this industry are going to have to decide whether the cost of that access is worth the loss of their good names and the acquisition of a reputation for being soft on child pornographers, for being advocates of freedom of information for some and not others, and for rolling over on its ordinary customers like trained poodles.

Linked to: Don Surber | Conservative Cat |

Tags: yahoo | china | censorship |Free Speech | google