Fred Wilson and Jeff Jarvis have been having a lively debate (Buzzmachine) about the inability of Yahoo!'s Terry Semel to answer a straight question as to the moral dimension of doing business in China.
The cost of doing business in China appears to include collaborating with its pseudo-communist gerontocracy in the pursuit of alleged dissidents, and at a recent Q&A Terry Semel ducked a number of questions about the ethics of this compromise. "I continue to be pissed off, outraged, and feel very very bad about it. But you have to follow the laws of the country you're in", the Wall Street Journal reports him as saying. When asked whether Yahoo! would have co-operated with Nazi Germany (the traditional moral reductio ad absurdum known as Godwin's Law) his answer was still feebler, "Yahoo! has a basic obligation not to have a point of view on basic content" - ergo, a retreat into complete moral relativism.
Nothing about Yahoo!'s stated policy on the matter has therefore been impressive. However, as an English observer the debate surrounding the policy of US media companies in China continues to strike me as bizarrely US-centric. During the last furore over Google's willingness to censor its results in China, China-centric media blog Danwei had the following to say:
"Google's 'caving in' to Chinese censorship has caused outbursts of
self-righteous anger that Google is cooperating with the government in
censoring the Internet.
The self-righteous anger is absurd. People who say Google should pull out of China rather than offer a censored service do not use the Internet in China."
Google co-founder Sergey Brin made a similar point in an interview with Fortune; "we ultimately made a difficult decision, but we felt that by participating there, and making our services more available, even if not to the 100 percent that we ideally would like, that it will be better for Chinese Web users, because ultimately they would get more information, though not quite all of it."
I can fully appreciate American media commentators being unimpressed that American media companies seem to be taking a morally relativist stance that ultimately leaves them abetting China's autocrats in repressing open debate. Jeff Jarvis's point that "what’s troubling is that we have not heard a statement of principles here, other than Semel being unhappy" is a perfectly fair one - it would be better for all concerned if Yahoo! could at least acknowledge the existence of a line it will refuse to cross, and Semel should have acknowledged that doing business with Nazi Germany, however hypothetically, was on the other side of that line. But the focus of the debate about Yahoo! and Google's involvement in China should really be what is best for the Internet users in China - not whether decisions taken about the Chinese Internet will sit comfortably with the consciences of commentators elsewhere.
Quite a few US companies collaborated with the Nazis, so the question doesn't seem at all far-fetched.
Posted by: Krasimir [Vidize.com] | June 07, 2006 at 07:20 AM
Krasimir -
True, and especially technology companies now I think about it. Op cit the whole "IBM punch cards helped coordinate the holocaust" argument (see e.g. http://qurl.com/qv8n1).
Posted by: Seamus McCauley | June 07, 2006 at 08:02 AM
The thought that US companies would be more concerned with ethical than financial considerations is absurd. Weapons components sold to mustachioed dictators anyone? The only reason this is a story at all is due the continued ludicrous pretence that the internet is still a free and groovy place, full of love and sharing.
Posted by: Adam Hall | June 08, 2006 at 01:44 PM