20 July 2006 - 8:36am
Amnesty International paints Yahoo, Microsoft and Google red
Or actually, those companies have done it themselves by cooperating with the Chinese government's censorship of the web in order to gain access to the Communist cash cow, the Chinese marketplace.
"The Internet should promote free speech, not restrict it. We have to guard against the creation of two Internets — one for expression and one for repression," said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty's U.S. branch, in a statement.
The companies "have violated their stated corporate values and policies" in their pursuit of China's booming Internet market, the statement said. It appealed to them to "call for the release of `cyber-dissidents.'"
Of course, these corporations protest their innocence. But what is this but collaboration:
Yahoo has been the most severely criticized after the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company's China operation provided information on e-mail users that was used to sentence two dissidents to prison.
Google has been criticized for censoring search results on its China site. Microsoft has banned terms such as "human rights" from its Chinese Web log service and shut down the U.S.-based log of a Chinese blogger at Beijing's request.
More from Search Engine Watch Blog, Lifehacker.
Since this is Amnesty International talking (report in PDF), I can guess at the rumbling knee-jerk reaction we can expect from the radical right. Watch for their claims that it's a good thing how American corporations are helping Communist China oppress its population. After all, that's how Dick Cheney got rich(er) in the '90s.
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"Since this is Amnesty International talking (report in PDF), I can guess at the rumbling knee-jerk reaction we can expect from the radical right. Watch for their claims that it's a good thing how American corporations are helping Communist China oppress its population. After all, that's how Dick Cheney got rich(er) in the '90s."
Doubtful. The majority of blogs (of which mine is one) that the Indian gov't banned are Right wing and American.
No offense, but that was just some left wing BS fear mongering. I have yet to read one Conservative site that claims that the censorship is a good thing. The worst you will read is that Google is a private company, and can do what they want.
Perhaps you would care to back up your statement with a link or citation?
Just search "Amnesty International Report" + America, or a variant on that, and you'll find a litany of dittohead posts crying about the evils of Amnesty International, following the rantings of Rush, Bill, Ann and their ilk.
And I can imagine that your average neo-fascist Christianist right winger in America couldn't give two hoots about what they consider a bunch of heathens in India, a country the vast majority of Americans could not even identify on a map.
My apologies for my Americanist perspective, but this blog as largely focused on American politics, even as they affect the rest of the world -- especially so.
There's one area where I do agree: Most conservatives seem to have become so corporatist that they take the knee-jerk position that corporations can do no wrong. Thus they don't seem to react much to Americans collaborating with Communism. How ironic, that, for the party whose pundits and leaders revere McCarthy.