Written by Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, from International Herald Tribune:
A milestone of sorts was passed in the first quarter of this year when China blew past the United States to become the biggest Internet market in the world. At 225 million users and still growing at double-digit rates, China’s Internet is a business opportunity so grand and irresistible that it can blind normally circumspect people to the moral compromises that cooperation with Chinese government authorities inevitably entails.
I experienced this first-hand when, about a year ago, I made inquiries at the China offices of a number of American law firms to ask for help in comparing results for Internet searches performed inside China – within the “Great Firewall” of government censorship, as it is called – with searches performed from outside.
The law firms demurred, explaining, with commendable candor at least, that they could not risk being observed checking out search terms like “Tiananmen Square” or “Falun Gong.” Mind you, these were the kind of lawyers who spend their careers pushing back against the demands of government authorities.
