How can we let Internet companies know helping China oppress its people is NOT okay?

[thatcrazycajun]

Yahoo! co-founder /honcho Jerry Wang found himself on the hot squat today, facing a Congressional committee in Washington and having to explain to its members—and to the mother of a jailed dissident, seated right behind them—why their company had cooperated with the Communist rulers of the People's Republic of China in tracking down and snooping on her son, as well as on other citizens it felt threatened enough by to want them in jail, for the "crimes" of speaking out against government policy, or even merely daring to seek out news and information from non-Beijing-approved sources. (See my local paper's article here.)

Yahoo! isn't the only offender, either; Google and Microsoft have also been guilty of wanting into the lucrative Chinese Internet/IT services market so badly they were willing to hand over information about their Chinese users that should have been privileged and private...and would have been, in any country not led by paranoid authoritarians (yeah, I know, that may be a redundancy). The infocorps argue that even censored information is better than none at all for those under the bootheel, and that they should not be denied full access to all the wonders of the Information Age just because we might not approve of how their governments are run. (And all that moolah to be made has nothing whatsoever to do with it. Sh'yeah, right.)

But what can us poor individual Western users do about this shameless corporate kow-towing to tyranny? Refuse to use the offending companies' products and services? For how long? And which ones? Stage a day of protest? Send letters, e-mails or other communiques to their officers and boards? I'm throwing open the floor to suggestions. All I'm saying is, there's got to be some way we users in the US, who represent the single largest chunk of their customer base outside of China, can pressure these gutless putzes to stop aiding and abetting oppression.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Vote with our feet, wallets, keyboards, etc. Promote sites like Fastmail and 30boxes and such that don't do this sort of thing, aren't publicly owned, don't commit corporate sociopathy. Support your local geek that's working on things like OpenAPI and other cool stuff that will eventually support distributed social networking - each person has his or her own server (real or virtual, their choice) and decides what is and isn't cool on that particular site and what info s/he will trade with whom. Remember Usenet? I want that back. We can do that again, if we put our minds and our dollars to it.

I totally agree, YaGooSoft is t3h Ev1L. And the only way to win is not to play with them. Yes, it's a pain in the ASCII. And it's very hard not to use the Google sometimes. But the other two are increasingly easy to declare irrelevant...

[thatcrazycajun.livejournal.com]

The only problem with a total boycott of YaGooSoft is that they've spent so much time/money buying up really cool and useful stuff on the Net, it's harder and harder to just say no. Google now owns YouTube, for example, and lots of folks on my friends list love linking their LJ pages to videos there. Same for Flickr, now owned by Yahoo! And even if you're willing to go completely Linux/Ubuntu on your machines, it's still not completely possible to avoid dealing with Micro$oft if you have any dealings at all with other computer users, professional or not.

The other stuff, like TOR and OpenAPI, I can see getting behind. But I'd like to have some meaningful way of pressuring the Big Three that doesn't involve tossing out half or more of the software and equipment I use daily and censoring much of my LJ reading. What you propose is considerably more than just a "pain in the ASCII."

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

You asked what we can do. I said.

It's actually not as painful as it sounds, if one is dedicated to the proposition. OpenOffice goes a long, long way towards helping one be Microsoft-free... the flip side of that is that the fact that so many of the Free Software tools have been ported to Windows is that it makes the first steps easy. Firefox for IE. OpenOffice for Office. OpenOffice is also a fairly decent web authoring tool, and most good ISP's will also give you web space with your account. There's your hosting problem. There are other things one can do for other problems.

I'm aware that I've been doing this for many, many moons, and for me things are easy that for you may be hard. I'm also willing to take the time to show folks how. (Wish I could make a real living at it... then again, careful what I wish for? I'm not as patient as I used to be...)

So. Confucius say longest journey start with single step.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Oh, and the other thing? Keep putting the word out about this. Sooner or later it will get back to their would-be victims. Also, if you have your own server, you can participate in TOR (http://www.torproject.org/), an anonymous proxy project...