Internet services company Yahoo! has said the only way to avoid being
forced to hand over information on dissidents in China is to end all
involvement with the country.
The company has been attacked by human rights groups for giving
information to the Chinese authorities in 2003 about the online
activities of dissident Li Zhi that led to his arrest and an eight-year
prison term.
However, Srinija Srinivasan, editor-in-chief of Yahoo!, told last
month’s Business for Social Responsibility annual conference in New
York that reaching a compromise with the Chinese authorities had not
been possible. ‘When the Chinese government comes to you for this
information, it’s a demand, not a request,’ she told delegates. ‘You
must comply with the local laws or risk your employees being jailed,
and we will not risk our staff being jailed. It’s not like the question
is “we have this journalist we want to track down, please help us”.
What happens is totally opaque, and you have no idea whether the demand
is for information in the context of a murder investigation,
kidnapping, child pornography or the questioning of a journalist. So
our decision is to comply.’
Yahoo! has now sold its China service to a Chinese company, Alibaba,
and no longer has a controlling interest in the operation. But
Srinivasan said the policy would not change. ‘We’re unhappy about the
outcome [of the Li Zhi case] but our hope is that our presence there
will change things. We have openly condemned [the government’s] action,
and pressure from individuals, civil society and industry may change
things.’
Srinivasan later told EP that Yahoo! ‘is of the firm conviction that we
can do more positive things by being in China’. The company is
co-operating with other search engine providers to draw up voluntary
guidelines on how to operate in ‘restrictive environments’, but
Srinivasan said she could see no way for these to address the specific
problem of avoiding official demands for information on service users.
‘The only way to do that is not to be there,’ she said.
Arvind Ganesan of Human Rights Watch told the conference that if Yahoo!
insisted on taking such a position then it must begin to try to
challenge demands made by the Chinese authorities, either by going
through the courts or by seeking help from other governments.
