Free Republic

Yahoo has shut down its services in mainland China, becoming the second Western tech giant to pull the plug on China over the past month.The company stopped providing content for mainland Chinese users as of Nov. 1, according to a statement from its official website. “Products and services remain unaffected in all other global locations,” it said.Yahoo made the decision “[i]n recognition of the increasingly challenging business and legal environment in China,” a company spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email on Tuesday, adding that “Yahoo remains committed to the rights of our users and a free and open...

In 2006, Thailand announced it was blocking access to YouTube for anyone with a Thai I.P address, and then identified 20 offensive videos for Google to remove as a condition of unblocking the site. ‘If your whole game is to increase market share,’ says Lawrence Lessig, speaking of Google, ‘it’s hard to . . . gather data in ways that don’t raise privacy concerns or in ways that might help repressive governments to block controversial content.’ In March of last year, Nicole Wong, the deputy general counsel of Google, was notified that there had been a precipitous drop in activity...

BEIJING, China (AP) -- China will have to tolerate more dissent as its economy grows and opens up to the rest of the world, former President Clinton said Sunday. Clinton, who is on a four-day visit to China, also said he would have raised the case of a Chinese journalist imprisoned for allegedly providing state secrets to foreigners when he spoke at a conference on Saturday but he had not been aware of the issue at the time. Clinton delivered the keynote address at a conference hosted by Internet powerhouse Yahoo Inc.'s new Chinese partner, Alibaba.com, at the eastern...

Former US president Bill Clinton urged China yesterday to recognize the urgency of the environmental threats to its growth, and to use the Internet as a tool to surmount them. But he remained silent on the risks faced by those who use the Internet as a forum for dissent. "You will have to come to grips with significant challenges to your growth," Clinton said at an Internet conference in this eastern resort city, warning that the energy consumption required to keep China's economy growing at its recent rate of more than 9 percent is "unsustainable." Clinton, the keynote speaker...

Dear President Clinton: We, the undersigned organizations, urge you, as the keynote speaker of the 2005 China Internet Summit at West Lake in Hangzhou, China, to call for the release of Shi Tao, a journalist and Internet activist serving a 10-year sentence for divulging state secrets. This Summit provides a prime opportunity to address the controversy over the role of U.S. Internet companies operating in China. We would like you to talk directly with Jerry Yang, cofounder of Yahoo!, who will be a speaker at this event, about the role that Yahoo Holdings (Hong Kong) Ltd. played in providing...

.... and I encourage others to stop using Yahoo! and Yahoo!-related resources. (Hat tips for original news: Global Voices Online, through Instapundit, Roger Simon, and RConversation) Yes, there are plenty of bad actors in the American high-tech sellout of the Chinese people and their aspirations for freedom (commented on previously here [1st item], here [1st item], and in the body of several other China-related posts). But Yahoo! is the first company I know of that has actively aided and abetted the Chinese police state in an actual prosecution and jailing of a reporter (bolds are mine): Information supplied by Yahoo!...