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Article

14 Feb 2006

Author:
Rebecca MacKinnon, fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, on her weblog, RConversation

Before Congressional Hearings, Yahoo! issues vague ethical "guidelines"

Sure, government dialogue is good... However, the only successful U.S. government efforts to change Chinese policy and regulations that I have observed have been ones...in which U.S. companies have been heavily involved with lobbying the Chinese bureaucracy... So if Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others sit back and say: this is the government’s business and don’t make concerted efforts to assist and lobby in China, we can conclude they’re not very serious... One very interesting idea that I’ve been hearing making the rounds is that maybe some kind of new requirements could be imposed on internet companies listing on U.S. exchanges (which now includes a bunch of Chinese companies): that in order to be listed, you can’t engage in creating information barriers or expose user’s data to situations in which human rights violations could be possible.