Earlier this month it was reported that at the request of China's rulers, Microsoft shut down the Web site of a Chinese blogger that was maintained on a Microsoft service called MSN Spaces. The blogger, Zhao Jing (趙京), had been reporting on a strike by journalists at the Beijing News that followed the dismissal of the newspaper's independent-minded editor.
Microsoft's action raises a key question: can the Internet really be a force for freedom that repressive governments cannot control as easily as newspapers, radio and television?
Ironically, Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates has been an enthusiastic advocate of this view. Just last October, he said: "There's really no way to, in a broad sense, repress information today, and I think that's a wonderful advance we can all feel good about ... [T]his is a medium of total openness and total freedom, and that's what makes it so special."
Despite these sentiments, Microsoft is helping the Chinese authorities repress information as best they can. A Microsoft spokeswoman was reported as saying that the corporation has blocked "many sites" in China, and it has been known for several months that Microsoft's blog tool in China filters words like "democracy" and "human rights" from blog titles.
Microsoft's defense is that it must "comply with local and global laws."
But the MSN Spaces sites are maintained on servers in the US. The relevant local laws would therefore seem to be those of the US, and Zhao Jing's discussion of the Beijing journalists' strike does not violate any of them.
Nor are there any global laws that prevent Chinese people from discussing events that their government would prefer them not to discuss. The New York Times, for example, is free to publish its report on the strike, even though it operates a Web site that anyone with unfettered Internet access can read. If the Chinese government does not want its citizens to read a foreign newspaper, then it is up to them to figure out how to block access to it. The newspaper is under no obligation to do it for them.
So Microsoft's defense misfires. We can only guess at the company's real reason for taking down the Web site, but fear of repercussions against its commercial interests in China seems likely to have been an important factor.
To be sure, a corporation can and should place limits on the use of its services. The absolutist line -- let complete freedom of expression prevail -- crumbles in the face of uncomfortable examples. According to Gates, Microsoft might prevent the use of its services to spread instructions about making nuclear bombs, to send pro-Nazi statements into Germany, where such material is illegal, and to propagate child pornography.
But how relevant are such examples?
In his classic defense of freedom of expression, On Liberty, John Stuart Mill argued that the most important reason for freedom of expression is to promote competition between the widest possible range of ideas, and that unfettered debate is the best way to test them. For the government to protect ideas from criticism is to turn them into a lifeless and rigid dogma, regardless of whether they are true.
If we agree with Mill, then only one of Gates' examples falls into the category of expression that should be protected. Recipes for making nuclear bombs are techniques, not ideas. Nor is child pornography the expression of ideas. We may therefore restrict both of them without running afoul of Mill's argument (on the other hand, an essay arguing that there is nothing wrong with adults taking a sexual interest in children, and that such conduct should be permitted, expresses ideas, and thus should not be censored, no matter how poisonous we may consider them).
The most difficult of Gates' three examples is that of pro-Nazi statements on a Web site aimed at Germany.
It is easy to understand why Germany would wish to prohibit such statements. Several countries' laws proscribe incitement of racial hatred, which can be justified, consistently with Mill's defense of liberty, if such laws really focus narrowly on incitement of hatred rather than on suppressing arguments, bad as they may be, that appeal to people's intellectual capacities.
A defender of suppression of Nazi ideas might argue that they have already been tried, and have failed -- in the most horrendous manner imaginable -- to produce a better society. Nevertheless, the best possible sign that Germany has overcome its Nazi past would be to focus its laws specifically on incitement to racial hatred, rather than on Nazism as such.
In any case, China's crackdown on straightforward reporting and discussion of events taking place in that country is not the suppression of a discredited political ideology, but of open and informed political debate. If Bill Gates really believes that the Internet should be a liberating force, he should ensure that Microsoft does not do the dirty work of China's government.
Peter Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) sits down with US President Donald Trump in Beijing on Thursday next week, Xi is unlikely to demand a dramatic public betrayal of Taiwan. He does not need to. Beijing’s preferred victory is smaller, quieter and in some ways far more dangerous: a subtle shift in American wording that appears technical, but carries major strategic meaning. The ask is simple: replace the longstanding US formulation that Washington “does not support Taiwan independence” with a harder one — that Washington “opposes” Taiwan independence. One word changes; a deterrence structure built over decades begins to shift.
The cancelation this week of President William Lai’s (賴清德) state visit to Eswatini, after the Seychelles, Madagascar and Mauritius revoked overflight permits under Chinese pressure, is one more measure of Taiwan’s shrinking executive diplomatic space. Another channel that deserves attention keeps growing while the first contracts. For several years now, Taipei has been one of Europe’s busiest legislative destinations. Where presidents and foreign ministers cannot land, parliamentarians do — and they do it in rising numbers. The Italian parliament opened the year with its largest bipartisan delegation to Taiwan to date: six Italian deputies and one senator, drawn from six
Recently, Taipei’s streets have been plagued by the bizarre sight of rats running rampant and the city government’s countermeasures have devolved into an anti-intellectual farce. The Taipei Parks and Street Lights Office has attempted to eradicate rats by filling their burrows with polyurethane foam, seeming to believe that rats could not simply dig another path out. Meanwhile, as the nation’s capital slowly deteriorates into a rat hive, the Taipei Department of Environmental Protection has proudly pointed to the increase in the number of poisoned rats reported in February and March as a sign of success. When confronted with public concerns over young
Taipei is facing a severe rat infestation, and the city government is reportedly considering large-scale use of rodenticides as its primary control measure. However, this move could trigger an ecological disaster, including mass deaths of birds of prey. In the past, black kites, relatives of eagles, took more than three decades to return to the skies above the Taipei Basin. Taiwan’s black kite population was nearly wiped out by the combined effects of habitat destruction, pesticides and rodenticides. By 1992, fewer than 200 black kites remained on the island. Fortunately, thanks to more than 30 years of collective effort to preserve their remaining
RSS