The head of the Association for Sustainable and Responsible Investment
in Asia has called on internet companies to produce a common policy on
how they should deal with demands for censorship of their web content
from countries with repressive regimes.
Melissa Brown, executive director of ASrIA, has also challenged Google,
Yahoo and Microsoft to say what requests they have had from the Chinese
government on censorship and to outline what censorship measures they
have imposed as a result. She said this would allow investors and
customers to ‘assign blame in a more appropriate way’.
Calls are increasing for clear policies from internet companies on how
they should react to censorship demands. Google and Yahoo have been
severely criticized for allowing the Chinese versions of their search
engines to be censored at the request of the Chinese authorities. Yahoo
has also been attacked for releasing information that led to the
imprisonment of Chinese ‘cyber-dissidents’ Li Zhi and Shi
Tao in 2003 and 2005 respectively. Yahoo has replied that it was forced
to do this under Chinese law.
In her call for action, Brown said internet companies have lacked
foresight about ‘the awkward realities of doing business in China’. She
said: ‘They are not the first and certainly won’t be the last group of
international companies to suffer when their special compromises for
market access in China are not well received by their global clientele.
What is surprising is how slow they have been to look at the lessons
learned by superficially more prosaic industries such as the apparel
sector.’
Brown said that if internet companies start revealing more details on
censorship issues now, they can talk more realistically about how to
build a long-term business in China ‘that will respect both Chinese
consumers and global norms’.
