• by September 12, 2005

A jailed Chinese journalist. A leading Internet company. What happened here, and can we expect more of these types of incidents? Shi Tao was slapped recently with a 10-year jail sentence for passing on a censorship order from the Chinese government via his Yahoo! e-mail account. Chinese authorities asked the global Internet powerhouse for e-mail account information that would eventually lead to Shi's conviction. The information was passed to Chinese police and Tao, a writer for the Contemporary Business News, was later arrested.

Shi, 37, was convicted in the spring for "revealing state secrets," by using his e-mail account to post on the Web a government order prohibiting Chinese journalists from marking the 15th anniversary of the June 1989 crackdown on protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. Speaking over the weekend at the Alibaba Internet Summit in Hangzhou, China, Yahoo! Co-Founder Jerry Yang explained that the company was compelled to surrender the information because it had to comply with Chinese laws.

Yang said he wasn't happy about the sentence, but that he couldn't discuss details of the case. Yahoo! and other Internet companies receive many requests for information from law enforcement agencies. Yang told Reuters: "We did not know what they wanted information for, we are not told what they look for, if they give us the proper documentation in a court order we give them things that satisfy local laws."

"I don't like the outcome of what happened with this thing--we get a lot of these orders, but we have to comply with the law, and that's what we need to do," Yang said.

Shi maintains his innocence and has said the government order wasn't a state secret.

These kinds of issues put Internet companies--and frankly, all entities that hold personal data on consumers--in a terrible bind. Companies like Yahoo! are sitting on an extraordinary amount of information about consumers. No one wants to see this information used for ill purposes. No one. That kind of information exchange doesn't inspire trust or community.

Interestingly, as companies expand into places like China and formerly eastern bloc countries like Hungary and Ukraine, they will need to balance their respect for customs, traditions, and laws with the desire to gain consumer trust and loyalty. Clearly, this is a challenge--and will only become more challenging as Internet companies accelerate global growth.

The Web is a free-market bazaar--a shopping place for ideas and stuff, a social community, an information source, a research tool, and a source for any manner of unexpected pleasures. Apparently not so in China, a country without democratic traditions. We have to wonder whether actions such as Yahoo!'s will inhibit online participation among people in countries like China. What choice did Yahoo! have? The MoveOn.org organization uses the Web to evangelize its ideas, raise funds, and attract volunteers. Relief organizations have used the Web extensively in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. On the other hand, the Web can be consulted for instructions on how to make a dirty bomb. The Bottom line: The Web can be used for good or evil. It has just that much possibility.