My post on the Guardian comment Blog about ICANN’s decision not to allow a .XXX domain for porn.
Category Archives: Censorship
The net fought the law – and the law won…
… is the headline on this morning’s Observer column. It’s a sub-editor’s nod to the Grateful Dead, who once recorded the song I fought the law, and the law won.
After a small bout of legal wrangling, Yahoo removed the auctions – once its executives remembered they possessed substantial assets physically located in France.
Spool forward two years, and we find the same company – once a flag carrier for internet freedom – metamorphosing into an obsequious accessory to Chinese political repression. In 2002, Yahoo signed a document entitled ‘Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry’ in which it promised to ‘inspect and monitor the information of domestic and foreign websites’ and ‘refuse access to those websites that disseminate harmful information to protect the internet users of China from the adverse influences of the information’. Since then Microsoft, Cisco and Google have trodden the same grisly path.
Yahoo’s breakneck transformation from libertarian bratpacker to authorised agent of thought control is the salutary tale with which Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu open their book, Who Controls the Internet? (just out from Oxford University Press). Both authors are academic lawyers, and Goldsmith has for years been challenging the myth of internet ungovernability. Now he and his co-author have laid out a persuasive case for this scepticism…
The Gates – Hu tapes
This morning’s Observer column…
When President Hu Jintao of China arrived in the US last Wednesday, his first appointment was dinner with Bill Gates, co-founder and chairman of Microsoft, at Gates’s mansion (aka San Simeon North) on the shores of Lake Washington. They dined on smoked guinea fowl, which had been shot at by the US Vice-President, Dick Cheney. (He missed, and hit one of his friends instead; the guinea fowl was later killed by humane means.) The pair were joined by Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, the Chinese ambassador to the US, a number of the President’s aides and the deputy assistant head of protocol at the White House. Owing to an unpatched security hole in Gates’s Windows-powered home-monitoring system, the meeting of the two Great Leaders was bugged and a transcript of their conversation has been obtained by The Observer …
Gates: You Hu?
Hu: I am the President of China.
Gates: Cool. I’m the Chairman of Microsoft. (Hu bows.)
Hu: Because you, Mr Bill Gates, are a friend of China, I am a friend of Microsoft.
Gates: Wow! That’s really cool. We’re very interested in China, you know. Big market. Smart people.
Hu: We are pleased that many great US companies are coming to China – for example Google.
Ballmer: (Heatedly) Those sons of bitches. They stole one of our top Chinese execs …
Gates: Cool it, Steve. Hu doesn’t know about that.
Hu: We also have Yahoo in China. They are very co-operative in rooting out undesirable elements.
Ballmer: (Mutters.) Maybe they could help root out Google …
Yahoo’s squalid collaboration with the Chinese regime
From Reporters sans frontières – China…
Reporters Without Borders has obtained a copy of the verdict in the case of Jiang Lijun, sentenced to four years in prison in November 2003 for his online pro-democracy articles, showing that Yahoo ! helped Chinese police to identify him.
It is the third such case, following those of Shi Tao and Li Zhi, proving the implication of the American Internet company.
The verdict, made available and translated into English by the human rights group, the Dui Hua Foundation, can be downloaded below.
“Little by little we are piecing together the evidence for what we have long suspected, that Yahoo ! is implicated in the arrest of most of the people that we have been defending,” the press freedom organisation said.
Stand by…
… for a new spasm of demands from clueless politicians for the Internet to be banned/censored/controlled. The reason? Today’s Observer has a report about the 7/7/ London tube/bus bombings which claims that:
A Whitehall source said: ‘The London attacks were a modest, simple affair by four seemingly normal men using the internet’.
The funny thing is that no politician ever calls for the telephone network to be banned, despite the very good evidence that it is used for drug dealing, terrorism and many other nefarious activities…
Iran’s nuclear aspirations
Wanting to have nuclear weapons is a perfectly rational aspiration for the leaders of the Iranian regime — for two reasons. The first is that they saw what happened to Iraq (which didn’t have nukes) — and what hasn’t happened to North Korea (which does). The second is that they have a hostile country in the region which surreptitiously obtained nuclear weapons many years ago — Israel.
I’ve always been baffled by the way Israel’s nukes are NEVER talked about in polite conversation. The Israelis always refuse to discuss them in public, and there the matter ends. Imagine the hoo-hah if the Iranians took that approach. It’s as if the Israeli nuclear capability isn’t an issue. But it clearly is for the Arab world, and for Iran (which, remember, was bombed by Israel some decades ago, with the aim of disabling Iranian nuclear capability). So it was refreshing to see this article by David Hirst which doesn’t just mention the unmentionable, but actually ponders it at some length.
For all I know, there may be good reasons for Israel to have nuclear weapons. (There are some countries in the region which deny the right of Israel to exist.) There may be rational reasons for the West to be less worried about Israeli nukes than they would be about Iranian ones. (Israel is a democracy, for example, whereas Iran is not.) But these are all reasons to talk about the Israeli weapons, not to pretend that they don’t exist.
Why are only some faiths sacrosanct?
I’ve always agreed with H.L. Mencken that “you should respect the other guy’s religion, but only to the extent that you respect his view that his wife is beautiful and his children smart”. (“I believe”, he wrote somewhere, “that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind – that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking”. Amen.)
So the plight of believers who get all worked up because someone has offended their religious sensibilities leaves me cold. I expect the police to prosecute, in due course, the fanatics who were waving placards about beheading their fellow-citizens (though I think the police were wise not to arrest them on the spot that day), and I will be very pissed off if they don’t. But Nick Cohen makes an interesting point in his column today — which deals with the way our mass media blithely offend Catholic and Jewish sensibilities but back off when it comes to our Muslim brethren. “You can’t be a little bit free”, he observes. “If you are not willing to offend Islamists who may kill you, what excuse do you have for offending Catholics, the families of murdered children and British troops who won’t?” Precisely. No wonder people conclude that violence — or the threat of it — is the only thing that really works. That’s not to say that fear of being murdered is not a rational sentiment. But it does rather expose the contemporary cant about the importance of a ‘free’ press — it’s free only when there’s little real danger.
I haven’t seen the offending Danish cartoons, btw (because they weren’t published in the British media, as far as I can tell), but the current issue of Private Eye prints a useful textual description of each. (Only in the print edition, alas.)
Update: Lots of helpful emails, pointing to locations on the Web where the cartoons, or accounts of them, are posted. There’s a good Wikipedia page on the whole business. Many thanks to Werner, Ben and others for the leads.
Those new Chinese search logos
Images by Cafe Press, a charity which supports human rights campaigns in China.
A new corporate motto for Google?
In view of the moral capitulation to Chinese demands, perhaps “Don’t be evil” should be modified to read “Do the lesser evil”?
Chinese chickens — contd.
There’s a wonderfully ironic blast in Good Morning Silicon Valley today about the Chinese censorship issue. Here’s a sample:
Given a choice, representatives of four big tech companies probably wouldn’t be spending the day sitting in front of a congressional panel getting their eyebrows singed by accusations that they consort with torturers. But there they sat today — the crash-test dummies sent by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco to take the hit for their employers’ concessions to repression as the price of doing business in China — as Rep. Tom Lantos, ranking Democrat on the International Relations Committee, unloaded on them: “Your abhorrent actions in China are a disgrace. I simply don’t understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night.” And Republican Rep. Chris Smith, chairman of the House subcommittee on global human rights, produced a quote that should be engraved on the entrance of every stock exchange: “Cooperation with tyranny should not be embraced for the sake of profits.”
The responses from the witnesses was [sic] familiar: The “lesser evil” argument (Google’s Elliot Schrage: “The requirements of doing business in China include self-censorship — something that runs counter to Google’s most basic values and commitments as a company. … [but Google entered the market believing it] will make a meaningful, though imperfect, contribution to the overall expansion of access to information in China.”) and the “little us” argument (Yahoo’s Michael Callahan: “These issues are larger than any one company, or any one industry.’ … We appeal to the U.S. government to do all it can to help us provide beneficial services to Chinese citizens lawfully and in a way consistent with our shared values.”).
For Rep. Smith, that just doesn’t cut it. “It’s an active partnership with both the disinformation campaign and the secret police, and the secret police in China are among the most brutal on the planet,” he said. “I don’t know if these companies understand that or they’re naive about it, whether they’re witting or unwitting. But it’s been a tragic collaboration. There are people in China being tortured courtesy of these corporations.”
I particularly liked the headline on the piece: “But we’re only giant, powerful tech companies … how could we possibly make a difference?” And the phrase “crash-test dummies”. Must make a note of it. Might come in useful sometime.