Yahoo’s public shaming before the House Foreign Affairs Committee last November apparently had quite an effect on Internet companies cooperating with Chinese government censorship and demands for information on dissidents. Less than a year after that brutal Capitol Hill humiliation, during which Committee Chairman Tom Lantos (D., Calif.) lambasted Yahoo’s leadership as moral “pygmies,” Yahoo, along with Microsoft and Google, is introducing a code of conduct that will govern their business practices in repressive countries.
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Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang’s public shaming before the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week has apparently accomplished what Yahoo’s skewed moral compass could not: prompt the company to provide financial and humanitarian support to the Chinese dissidents it helped imprison.
Less than a week after Yang’s grueling Capitol Hill appareance, during which Committee Chairman Tom Lantos [...]
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If you think our witnesses today are uncomfortable sitting in this climate-controlled room and accounting for their company’s spineless and irresponsible actions, imagine how life is for Shi Tao, spending 10 long years in a Chinese dungeon for exchanging information publicly–exactly what Yahoo claims to support in places like China.”
–Statement of Rep. Tom Lantos (D., [...]
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Sure, Yahoo signed China’s “Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry,” a voluntary agreement to monitor and restrict information deemed “harmful” by Beijing, but did it have to take it quite so seriously? Was it really necessary to divulge the identity of a Chinese journalist who was subsequently arrested and sent to prison for a decade?
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