ON YAHOO!, GOOGLE ET AL IN CHINA, PART II

AND ONE MORE THING...

Jeff Jarvis has a comment to my earlier post that I'd like to highlight and respond to.  First his comment:

"Michael,

With all due respect, I think it is just as unproductive to dismiss the discussion as "meaningless" it is to dismiss Semel as a "plain fool."

The important question here is about limits. Are there limits to what a company should do following the laws of the dictatorship in China? That is what we are trying to figure out. That is an important discussion to have.

So it's legitimate, I think, to try to find that out via other examples. Would you say it's OK for a company to have done business in apartheid South Africa, for example? Is it OK for a company to hand over users for exercising what all civilized nations recogize as the human right of free speech if that speech violates the propagandistic stranglehold of a dictatorship?

Just because other companies do it, that doesn't make it OK, I'm sure you'd agree.

Let us, indeed, have this discussion on the merits."

Jeff, thanks for the comment.

I couldn't agree more about having the discussion on the merits, AS LONG AS IT doesn't involve critiquing JUST the actions of a handful of internet companies.

Jeff is right to point out the success of the world's compact against apartheid in South Africa, but that's what it was...a concerted, global, multi-party effort that involved the active participation and cooperation of a wide range of governments, multi-nationals, institutional investors and a plethora of other parties over the course of a number of years.  As this entry from Wikipedia highlights:

"After much debate, by the late 1980's the United States, the United Kingdom, and 23 other nations had passed laws [9] placing various trade sanctions on South Africa. A divestment[10] movement in many countries was similarly widespread, with individual cities and provinces around the world implementing various laws and local regulations  forbidding registered corporations under their jurisdiction from doing business with South African firms, factories, or banks."

In this instance, we have a number of folks in the blogging and media worlds, taking the opportunity to bash Yahoo! and Google at every opportunity over "The China Problem". And there is almost no focus on the actions of most of the world's governments and companies, who are eagerly rushing in to do business with China for obvious reasons.

No one seems to be asking similar questions of a wide range of companies in the media, telecommunications, technology, and other industries. 

We don't have most of the world dealing with The "China Problem", as they once did with South Africa.  The obvious reason is that China is much valued future market for most, and plays an entirely different role as a trading partner with the rest of the world than South Africa ever did. 

So almost everyone seems to be getting a free pass on their dealings with China.

Until of course it comes to our leading internet companies.

Then, we get a concerted PR effort aimed at the senior executives of the internet companies, peppering them with no-win questions like the one Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel got at the D Conference.

Or like at the time when CEO Eric Schmidt of Google faced these questions at his company's annual meeting by Amnesty International . 

As Jeff Jarvis's post explained on the Yahoo! Q&A:

"...someone from the audience got up and asked a question. The question was what would Yahoo!’s position be if it was the Nazi Germany and Hitler instead of China."

That's not a discussion on the merits in my book.  It's headline-baiting, plain and simple .

My issue is not with the debate on the merits. 

It's who we choose to restrict the debate to while excluding almost everyone else.  And when we do it with personal insults.

Until we broaden the focus to include a much wider array of companies and countries, the "debate" seems like a meaningless "feel-good" exercise for the participants on the "against China/Yahoo/Google" side.

Comments

[Jeff Jarvis]

So, fine, make the hall of shame. List all the companies you want. But just because others do it, that doesn't make it OK for any one of them to do it. As a person and executive, you have to pass the mirror-in-the-morning test. A movement starts with one brave, principled person. Who will that be?

And this is about Yahoo because it was Semel on the stage saying stupid things. There has been plenty of criticism of Google, too, not to mention News Corp. for years.

And all that is beside the point. Didn't all our mother's tell us that they didn't care if someone else was doing it, they cared if we were doing it. If your friend jumped off the bridge, they challenged us, would you? If your friend handed in a journalist to go to jail for 10 years, would you? That is the real question. Answer it or answer the Hitler question or the apartheid question, then. Where is the limit? What is the principle. That is the discussion I think we should have.

So where is the limit of an individual executive's and company's responsibility? Let's have that discussion.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And see how Sergey Brin just acknowledged that Google's actions may not be principled.

[howardhoward Lindzon]

Great points, part of the problem I see with the blogsphere the way it is set up right now is the noise level is only high in the tech industry - so it's paid for pand G, Gilette, the oil companies not to blog - so they don't have to answer these questions daily

[Ward]

Another aspect of the South Africa analogy is that for many years western businesses did business with them without any particular care about apartheid and then when the west decided to take action the South Africans regime was effectively ostracised. It is unclear to me wheather China is so fully integrated into the developed world at this point. It may be too soon and the double standard of internet companies versus say coke or ge is unhelpful as well.