So it seems the NUJ of UK and Ireland have called for a boycott of Yahoo! for their complicity in having a Chinese journalist jailed. Simon reminded us yesterday that it was the anniversary of the guy who stopped Chinese tanks with only the belief that freedom was worth facing down the killer machines of the Chinese Government. Now if only Yahoo! felt the same instead of being the co-driver in those thanks. Tom Raftery asked Bradley Horowitz before about Yahoo!’s bootlicking in China and he has also asked Vint Cerf about Google in China. Both gave bullshit answers in my view but these really are questions the top guys in Google and Yahoo! need to be answering.
Terry Semel tried to defend Yahoo! recently and then someone asked the Nazi question. Would Yahoo! have done business with the Nazi’s if Yahoo! was around in that era and the guy said he didn’t know. I only just looked up Terry’s profile. He’s the damned CEO and he doesn’t know? You can forgive Bradley Horowitz but the guy where the buck stops doesn’t know. Dumbass. I guess their corporate philosophy is just some ornament to hang in the boardroom. Jeff Jarvis makes the usual sense but also tears big strips too.
But lets not let Google away with this either. Check out the big difference in Google searches for Tiananmen Square on Google China and Google.com. It’s not rewriting history. It’s using invisble ink for some paragraphs, right?
Update: Linked to Simon’s site, not the site on making landing pages. Sorry.
The NUJ would get more for its efforts if it taught journalists at large how to operate an anonymous proxy, how to Skype their questions, how to cloak referrer strings and how to encrypt files.
BTW, the first syndicate to pick up on the NUJ’s machinations was Yahoo! But if the NUJ posturing is to be believed, no member will have read this:
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/02062006/325/nuj-calls-yahoo-boycott.html
While I tend to rip strips off of both companies, more for the fact that they’re hugely overvalued and massively overhyped than anything else, it should be noted that in this case both companies are complying the law of the country in which they were operating.
The only function of a corporation is to maximise share holder return and nothing else. The Nazi question is a straw man as we already know how that turned out but how many Chinese are there? If they want freedom from oppression there’s enough of them to take it.