Selling people up the river is not good business practice - 9.11.07

Selling people up the river is not good business practice - Entry for 09 November 2007

First point of information for this blog: Y360 Refugees
If you want to read further articles on this
Quotes taken from

It's been well publicised that Jerry Yang (Yahoo's CEO) and General Counsel Michael Callahan were raked over the coals by congress for Yahoo "providing Chinese officials with information that contributed to the 10-year prison term of a Chinese journalist. The dissident journalist was jailed after Yahoo turned over information about his online activities to Chinese authorities."

Living in China would be the Orwellian nightmare (1984) come to life that the deadly tentacles of a totalitarian regime can reach out and ruin the lives of its people with impugnity.

Some of the comments that came out of the above enquiry by congress follow.

"Yahoo claims that this is just one big misunderstanding. Let me be clear — this was no misunderstanding," House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos, D-Calif., said as his panel's hearing got under way. "This was inexcusably negligent behavior at best, and deliberately deceptive behavior at worst."

Explaining why the company had cooperated with the Chinese government, Jerry Yang argued that Yahoo responded to an official order from them.

"Furious, Lantos interrupted. "These were demands by a police state to make an American company a co-conspirator in having a freedom-loving Chinese journalist put in prison," he said. "Will you continue to use the phrase 'lawful orders,' or will you just be satisfied saying 'orders'?""

He further told Jerry Yang "While technologically and financially you (Yahoo) are giants, morally you are pygmies".

But it's not only Yahoo who are playing false with online users - so us - who are put in a position to trust that providers of public forums are trustworthy.

"Human rights and free-speech advocates have lambasted U.S. companies including Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. for helping the Chinese government stifle the flow of ideas in exchange for greater access to the country's rapidly growing Internet market. But the convictions of Shi and another Chinese journalist Yahoo provided information about have focused the most strident criticism on Yahoo."

The good ole Aussie phrase "keeping the bastards honest" has relevance here I think.

Hopefully the US will continue to put pressure on American corporations to maintain a moral high ground.

Wikipedia

Note: The moral high ground, in ethical or political parlance, refers to the status of being respected for being in the right and adhering to and upholding a universally recognized standard of justice or goodness.