NY Times News Service, New York
Let's play "What if?"
What if the Chinese authorities didn't simply force Google to exclude sites like hrw.org (the Human Rights Watch Web site) and lesbian.com from the Chinese version of its search engine results, or insist that Yahoo hop to whenever the government fancied the identity of one of its e-mail users, as the authorities have done?
What if they also stipulated that the chief executive of any Internet company doing business in China had to have "Mao Zedong (毛澤東) -- Luv U 4 Eva" tattooed across his back? Would the companies leave China?
The scary thing is, one might reasonably chew on that question longer than this one: What if Chinese law required Internet companies to reveal the identities of all users who forwarded really bad e-mail jokes, lame chain letters or any messages containing the terms "free speech," "Tiananmen Square" or "Super Freak," because such activities carried a 10-year prison term?
"With all due respect to the memory of Rick James, the king of funk," an executive might say, "we must abide by the laws of the countries in which we operate."
And what if -- as a mark of good faith for being permitted to do business in what any rational observer has to admit is now the most tantalizing Internet and technology market on the planet -- an executive from each company were required to assist, mano a mano, in the beating of an imprisoned blogger?
Nothing too strenuous, but you would have to make like you meant it.
What if no one had to know? They never would, right?
Yes, it's an all too easy and not entirely fair game to play. The issues on the ground in China are complex, and there are plenty of people who believe that Microsoft founder Bill Gates is right when he says, as he did last week when discussing the matter at a Microsoft-sponsored conference in Lisbon, that "the ability to really withhold information no longer exists."
That is to say, Microsoft or Google may agree to censor this or filter that, but in the end, censorship is no match for human ingenuity and the endless ways for the Internet to provide workarounds.
"You may be able to take a very visible Web site and say that something shouldn't be there, but if there is a desire by the population to know something, it is going to get out," Gates said.
But even if that's true, Western technology companies have only themselves to blame if users in the free world quickly ask when Shi Tao (師濤), the journalist whose name Yahoo gave to Chinese authorities and who subsequently was sentenced to a 10-year prison term, will be released. Or that people use what-ifs to ponder the moral limits of saying that local law is local law.
That's partly because it is only recently that any of the players have made any genuine efforts at transparency in their dealings with China.
Two weeks ago, Google took the bold step of plainly admitting that it was entering the Chinese market with a censored search product, tweaked according to government specifications. Then last week, Microsoft announced new policies that would enable it to honor a government's demand to shut down a citizen's blog (as happened five weeks ago with a popular MSN blogger in Beijing) while still keeping the blog visible outside of China.
But these are small victories, said Julien Pain of the group Reporters Without Borders, which tracks Internet censorship in China, not least because the companies "seem now to accept censorship as a given, and have simply decided to be transparent about it."
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