Tech firms help tyrants keep their grip
Microsoft Corp. is helping the government of China in its efforts to brainwash the country's 1.3 billion inhabitants. It's a tough job -- so tough even Microsoft can't pull it off. But it's willing to give it a try, along with such firms as Yahoo and Google.
It's about money, of course. China already has 94 million Internet users, the world's second-biggest online population after the United States, and there are still over a billion people yet to be hooked up. No way can Internet companies ignore a market like that.
On the downside, China is a thug state that forces women to abort their children, imprisons journalists for publishing the truth, and tortures religious believers for praying. It's hardly surprising that the country's leaders regard as profanity such words as ''democracy" and ''human rights." But it seems that Microsoft and China's oligarchs speak the same language.
Rebecca MacKinnon, a fluent Chinese speaker who spent nearly a decade covering China for CNN, is now a research fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Berkman last week visited the Chinese version of Microsoft's MSN Internet service, and tried to set up a Web log entitled ''I love freedom of speech, human rights and democracy."
Instead she got back an error message: ''You must enter a title for your space. The title must not contain prohibited language, such as profanity."
There's nothing new about US Internet companies acting as censors on China's behalf. Yahoo does it, too, and so does Google. But these companies have taken a less aggressive approach. Yahoo, for instance, waits until Chinese authorities complain about a user's website, and then takes steps to shut it down.
Google censors its Google News feature to block out Web news sources that are banned by the Chinese government, like the Voice of America. But spokeswoman Debbie Frost said it's done mainly because China's Internet services are already programmed to block these sites. It used to be that the front page of the Google News Chinese edition would slow to a crawl while trying to display a headline from a banned site. Frost said that Google just gave up and dropped all such links from the Chinese news page.
The Microsoft policy has ticked off Web libertarians who barely shrugged at Google's and Yahoo's policies. That's because Microsoft seems to have programmed its own computers to enforce China's barbarous censorship policies. The government needn't even complain about subversive content; Microsoft will ensure that it never appears.
Ask Microsoft about it, and they issue a canned response. ''MSN abides by the laws and regulations of each country in which it operates," the statement said.
Microsoft employee and well-known blogger Robert Scoble goes a little further in defending his bosses.
''It's not my place to make their laws," Scoble writes on his blog. ''It certainly is not my right to force their hand with business power. Any more than it's their place to make American laws."
Rubbish, MacKinnon replies.
''By not agreeing to comply with filtering requirements, you're not forcing the Chinese to do anything," she said. ''You're just not playing along with their game."
Indeed, MacKinnon said that Microsoft and other Internet companies should flatly refuse to comply with the Chinese government's filtering standards, and not only out of a love of free speech.
''We're getting into a national security issue," she fretted. MacKinnon fears that our support of Chinese censorship is storing up trouble for the United States in years to come, in the same way that our tolerance of Saudi fanaticism is now paying such ugly dividends.
Consider the case of Taiwan. Most Chinese support their country's bellicose attitude toward their ''rebellious province." But MacKinnon thinks this is largely because the Chinese get so little accurate information about Taiwan, through the Internet or any other media. ''If you did have a free exchange of opinion," she said, ''maybe more people on the mainland might say, you know, let's let those Taiwanese do what they want."
Instead, Taiwan is demonized, and the masses cheer their leaders' belligerent posturing. All in all, it's a good way to start a war. And US Internet companies would share some of the blame, in MacKinnon's view, for helping Beijing keep its citizens in the dark.
''This comes down as their larger responsibility as Americans," MacKinnon said.
Against this noble sentiment, the pallid justifications of Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo seem pretty limp. They'll only say that they obey the laws of the countries where they do business. What goes unsaid is that they must also answer to the laws of economics, and to shareholders who will be mightily displeased if the companies abandon the world's most populous country.
But something else has gone unsaid as well. The leaders of Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google know that China's effort to seal off its populace from reality is doomed to failure. Sure, Yahoo's China-based service is censored, but there are plenty of other Chinese-language sites stuffed full of subversion, and there's no way the bullies in Beijing can stifle them all. To continue its economic rise, China needs tens of millions of highly educated people. Such people don't need unfettered Internet access to realize their government is lying to them. The backlash is bound to come, sooner or later. And the American Internet companies will be well-established on the inside of the Chinese firewall, ready to open the floodgates of free information, as soon as the Chinese people demand it.
The Microsoft engineer who programmed their self-censoring blog system probably felt like taking a long, hot shower once the work was done. But he probably sang in the shower, and laughed at the stupidity of tyrants.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com. 