Following up on last week's story about China's censorship of the Internet and the cooperation of major companies like Microsoft and Yahoo!,
Business Week sits down with Nicholas Bequelin of
the Human Rights Watch in Hong Kong. Bequelin says that last year, when Yahoo! assisted the Chinese government in imprisoning a journalist (and subsequently received a ton of bad press in the U.S.),
it probably could not have acted differently despite the "objectionable moral and ethical grounds" of the situation. He says this merely illustrates "the cost of doing business with China," and that
to vilify these companies for cooperating with Beijing is ultimately "self-defeating." He adds that if U.S. Internet companies don't comply with China's wishes, they will simply be barred from doing
business there and China will instead prop up its own companies in place. Having said that, Bequelin adds that U.S. companies are being evasive and vague about their reasons for complying with China;
for example, he says firms could admit their technology can be used for repression and try to mitigate it through cooperation with global business standards organizations like the world information
summit or the U.N. global norms for business programs.
Read the whole story at Business Week »
