January 13th, 2006
Congress to address the Chinese growth/censorship conundrum
Harvard Law School Berkman Center research fellow Rebecca MacKinnon has the details on Congressional moves to address the Net censorship undertaken by companies like Yahoo and Microsoft who find themselves filtering content (at the request of the local authorities) in order to do business in a market that many American technology companies see as their hottest prospect for growth: China. As you can imagine, the intersection of censorship, free speech, the Internet, US-based companies, and foreign governments is a super thorny issue with precedents already being set in the American court system (see Declan McCullagh’s Court dismisses Yahoo’s free-speech lawsuit). Rebecca also points to a BusinessWeek story about Skype’s censorship of politically sensitive phrases (in China) like "Falun Gong" and "Dalai Lama. What a difficult situation.
