Written By Reprise Media | February 2, 2006 | Share This |

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If a Congressional caucus holds a briefing on Chinese internet censorship and no tech firms are there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Yes and no. News.com reports that human rights groups at yesterday’s briefing had plenty to say and plenty of time to say it, but Cisco, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google all pled short notice and sent statements - all four agree that both companies and governments have more work to do in opening up restrictive countries - in lieu of testifying. If that behavior suggests the quartet was treating the operation like pretty small potatoes, perhaps they had good reason: the Congressional Human Rights Caucus is fairly toothless, as it can’t force companies to comply with invitations to testify.

However, the US House Committee on International Relations can, and they’ve scheduled a hearing Feb. 15 that yesterday’s no-show firms plan to attend. And even without their participation, there was plenty of chiding to go around yesterday. California Representative (and Caucus co-chair) Tom Lantos did some of the scolding:

“With all of [the tech firms’] power and influence, wealth and high visibility, they neglected to commit to the kind of positive action that human rights activists in China take every day…They caved in to Beijing’s demands for the sake of profits, or whatever else they choose to call it.”

If comparing the activities of search engine companies to those of dedicated activists seems a bit unfair, we can at least forgive Lantos for being scantly informed on the terminology; he is after all in the business of making laws, not money. And many a law indeed were suggested at the briefing, from legislation that would penalize firms for colluding with censorship to forceful directives that would keep companies from locating their servers within opressive nations like China.

Of course, Google says the reason they elected to move their servers inside that country in the first place was so that Chinese users wouldn’t have to fight spotty service and firewalls to reach outside sites. Mitch Ratcliffe’s blog has an interesting bit about a web privacy tool company called Anonymizer, which is setting up a kind of floating crap game with a proxy server. Chinese users on a special email list would receive alerts - sent from a different source each time - as to the server’s address, also ever-changing. We think it’s a good idea, but wouldn’t those tens of thousands of Chinese internet cops also find a way onto that email list?

Topics: International |