About 1 hour after I wrote my previous post today about Yahoo! helping the Chinese un-democratic government in prosecuting political dissdents, the news came in that Skype (the voip company) also has caved in to Chinese laws and is actively censoring text messages that Chinese Skype users are sending one another: The Ebay-owned company admitted its joint-venture partner on the mainland, Tom.com, had edited messages containing words considered politically sensitive by the Chinese government.
Among them were “Falun Gong”, the outlawed religious sect, and “Dalai Lama”, the Buddhist leader of disputed Tibet, the Financial Times reported Wednesday. The Ebay-owned company admitted to doing this yesterday. According to Ebay chief executive Niklas Zennstrom (…)obeying Chinese laws was no different to obeying those in the United States or Germany, the company’s other big markets.
“I may like or not like the laws and regulations to operate businesses in the UK or Germany or the US but if I do business there I choose to comply with those laws and rgulations,” he said. “China in that way is no different.”
Off course this kind of logic is totally bullshit. Everyone knows that all of the countries he mentions have democratically elected goverments and none of those countries are on Amnesty International’s list of countries that violate human rights (well, except the US because they actually still have the death penalty and violate the rights of pow’s from Iraq and other countries at their Guantanamo Bay base). Basically what Skype, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and others are doing is looking the other way and actually ignoring everything that is wrong with China. And, by doing so, indirectly supporting a totalitarian regime.
Sadly enough: they are a bunch of hypocrits.