中国法律博客
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Some Brief Thoughts on Yahoo
媒体来源: 中国法律博客

I haven't really said much about the recent goings-on with Yahoo, but after Jerry Yang was hauled up to Congress and grilled about his company's cooperation with the authorities over here, I feel obligated to say something.

In the past, my view has (I hope) been fairly consistent. I feel kind of sorry for Yahoo. It is just trying to do business, and although there are of course limits on how far a corporation should go in cooperating with a government request, for the most part all these guys are turning data over to Beijing when asked. Pretty simple: they refuse, and it suddenly becomes very difficult to do business over here. Next time they need an approval for a transaction . . . who knows?

Is that a good thing. No, it isn't. However, that's the situation in the real world right now, and I don't think members of the U.S. Congress would recognize the real world even if it bit 'em on their pale white posteriors. They have problems of their own dealing with the Patriot Act and U.S. companies that illegally turned over user ID info to the Bush Administration. Hypocrisy is an ugly thing. In this case, it makes their moral condemnation of Yahoo look sort of ridiculous.

Yahoo certainly did not help its case by bungling the response and giving incorrect information to Congress – hard to get away with that, unless your name is Alberto Gonzalez. I am not surprised that communications over sensitive internal issues from the China office of a MNC were not channeled properly to folks in the head office. Not the first time something like that has happened – I'd be surprised if they were more organized, actually. However, this makes Yahoo look bad and gave Congress a lot more ammunition to use against Yang and his colleagues.

I do wish to say something about the Congressional hearing, however. I have not had the time to read the transcript, but I generally agree with Erik Schmidt at Tech LawForum that Yahoo provides a handy scapegoat for a Congress that is just itching to bash China these days. Absolutely true.

Schmidt points out that statements made by Tom Lantos, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee that was barbequing Jerry Yang, were unreasonable:

Lantos asserts that Yahoo didn’t have to roll over for the Chinese government. After all, Yahoo is a big, powerful company and has been doing business with the Chinese government for some time.

Like Schmidt, I think that this is rather absurd. Yahoo has a lot of leverage with the Chinese government?

I've had lots of problems with Lantos' China positions in the past, but I generally respect the man. His positions appear to be based on political and moral principles, and not naked nationalism. However, he seems to have engaged in some real theatrics during this hearing and used some rather colorful language. Asking Yang and the in-house counsel to apologize to the mother of the dude that was put in jail? That's going over the line, in my opinion, and qualifies as a cheap stunt for the cameras.

Declan McCullagh, who was liveblogging on the hearing (h/t RConversation – go here for a full roundup of this issue with lots o' links) had this to say:

I wonder if Lantos and other Patriot Act supporters will apologize to Americans like Brandon Mayfield (falsely jailed under the Patriot Act) or Sami al-Hussayen (a Webmaster who provided hyperlinks to Muslim sites and was prosecuted under the Patriot Act).

The bottom line: Yahoo did not handle this well, but they should not be held to a higher standard than other firms doing business over here. Oh yeah, and the U.S. Congress has, once again, come out of a controversial matter looking like dorks.