Thursday, October 06, 2005

Yahoo! continues to defend actions in Chinese journalist case

This was an inexcusable act, and no amount of whining about the local Chinese laws makes it any less despicable.

Juan Carlos Perez writes in InfoWorld:

Yahoo Inc.'s chairman and chief executive officer Terry Semel strongly defended the company's decision to turn over evidence to Chinese authorities that helped the government convict a local journalist and send him to jail for 10 years.

Companies that do business internationally have to respect and abide by the laws of the countries in which they operate, whether that be China or any other country, he said Thursday at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.

Acknowledging that "it's both a moral and legal issue" and that sometimes "on a personal level, I wince," Semel said that companies such as Yahoo have to either respect local laws or exit the country in question. If American companies opt to not do business in a country with whose laws they don't agree with may, that may hold back progress towards greater freedom in that country, he said.

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