Monday, June 11, 2007

Internet World Meets the Real World in China

While I have often taken great delight in writing about how Google's "arrogance of power" often blinds them to some (many?) of the realities on the physical world that most of us inhabit, readers should not take this as a personal preference for Yahoo! on my part (even if my Internet service happens to be provided through Yahoo!)! Beyond the immediacy of today's news about the rising tide of discontent with Terry Semel (and many of those who sail under him) by Yahoo! shareholders, there is the longer-range story about Yahoo! relations in China, whose reading is about as unpleasant as similar accounts concerned with Google. The Yahoo! case concerns an imprisoned dissident, and it is a story that the Associated Press has decided to follow closely. This morning Dikky Sinn summarized the current "state of play" as follows:

China should not punish people for expressing their political views on the Internet, Yahoo Inc. said Monday, a day after the mother of a Chinese reporter announced she was suing the U.S. company for helping officials imprison her son.

Yahoo criticized China in a brief statement that didn't specifically mention the case of jailed journalist Shi Tao, whose mother visited Hong Kong on Sunday. Shi was sentenced to 10 years in 2005 after sending an e-mail about Chinese media restrictions.

The company has acknowledged sharing information about Shi with Chinese authorities.

"Yahoo is dismayed that citizens in China have been imprisoned for expressing their political views on the Internet," the company said in the statement faxed to The Associated Press, which asked Yahoo to comment on Shi's lawsuit.

The Internet company, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., also said it has told China that it condemns "punishment of any activity internationally recognized as free expression."

However, Yahoo added that companies operating in China must comply with Chinese law or risk having their employees face civil or criminal penalties.

In other words Yahoo! is trying to take the moral high ground with their rhetoric without giving much thought to matching their rhetoric with action. This should not surprise anyone. Yahoo! is no better than any other organization (public or private, large or small) when it comes to taking on China; so about the only thing that distinguishes them from Google is that their CEO knows better than to try to bamboozle us with claptrap about an "evil score."

The more important story behind these stories, whether they involve Google or Yahoo!, reflects back on the moves that Vladimir Putin has been making, about which I wrote yesterday. In the game that we (whoever "we" may be) are now playing, we no longer hold all the cards; and, for a change, some of the best cards happen to be in the hands of people who feel it is about time to hold our values up to question. However disagreeable some of these people (and their values) may be, whether they are in Russia, Venezuela, or China, we seem to be tragically ignorant (through either will or circumstance) of the skills through which we can engage them. The simplistic explanation is that this is a consequence of reducing everything to questions of right and wrong or good and evil; but there may be a deeper problem that reflects (once again) on our national attitude towards education. After all, education is not just about what we get from our books and teachers, whether it involves the location of Zimbabwe or how Einstein came up with his relativity theory; it is also about acquiring a capacity for socialization in our classrooms that extrapolates out from teachers and students to just about anyone else we may encounter in the world. By all rights that acquisition should begin even before we get down to the basics of the three R's; but, when we look at the conduct of today's adult leaders (not to mention the actual social milieu in many public school classrooms), we have to wonder if the value of that capacity has lost all currency.

Yesterday I recalled old Soviet rhetoric about how they would bury us. Well, they didn't; but in the grand social scheme of things, we didn't bury them either. The more urgent question now is whether or not we are evolving into a society that will bury itself.

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