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
The image was oddly quiet. No speeches, no flags, no dramatic announcements — just a Chinese cargo ship cutting through arctic ice and arriving in Britain in October. The Istanbul Bridge completed a journey that once existed only in theory, shaving weeks off traditional shipping routes. On paper, it was a story about efficiency. In strategic terms, it was about timing. Much like politics, arriving early matters. Especially when the route, the rules and the traffic are still undefined. For years, global politics has trained us to watch the loud moments: warships in the Taiwan Strait, sanctions announced at news conferences, leaders trading
The saga of Sarah Dzafce, the disgraced former Miss Finland, is far more significant than a mere beauty pageant controversy. It serves as a potent and painful contemporary lesson in global cultural ethics and the absolute necessity of racial respect. Her public career was instantly pulverized not by a lapse in judgement, but by a deliberate act of racial hostility, the flames of which swiftly encircled the globe. The offensive action was simple, yet profoundly provocative: a 15-second video in which Dzafce performed the infamous “slanted eyes” gesture — a crude, historically loaded caricature of East Asian features used in Western
Is a new foreign partner for Taiwan emerging in the Middle East? Last week, Taiwanese media reported that Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Francois Wu (吳志中) secretly visited Israel, a country with whom Taiwan has long shared unofficial relations but which has approached those relations cautiously. In the wake of China’s implicit but clear support for Hamas and Iran in the wake of the October 2023 assault on Israel, Jerusalem’s calculus may be changing. Both small countries facing literal existential threats, Israel and Taiwan have much to gain from closer ties. In his recent op-ed for the Washington Post, President William
A stabbing attack inside and near two busy Taipei MRT stations on Friday evening shocked the nation and made headlines in many foreign and local news media, as such indiscriminate attacks are rare in Taiwan. Four people died, including the 27-year-old suspect, and 11 people sustained injuries. At Taipei Main Station, the suspect threw smoke grenades near two exits and fatally stabbed one person who tried to stop him. He later made his way to Eslite Spectrum Nanxi department store near Zhongshan MRT Station, where he threw more smoke grenades and fatally stabbed a person on a scooter by the roadside.
RSS