Regular contributor Bennett Haselton has written in to say that "The Global Online Freedom Act, introduced last year during a firestorm of controversy over American companies cooperating with totalitarian governments in China and elsewhere, was introduced this month as the Global Online Freedom Act of 2007. When Chris Smith (R-NJ) first introduced the law in 2006, Yahoo was under fire for recently turning over information to Chinese authorities that led to the arrest of a political dissident, Microsoft was attacked for removing pages from MSN Spaces China at the behest of the government, Google was being criticized for removing political sites from search results displayed to China, and Cisco was accused of helping to enable Chinese filtering of the Web. All four corporations testified at a February 2006 House hearing during which Representative Tom Lantos summed up the mood of many of his colleagues by telling the companies, "I do not understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night." The companies protested that they had no choice but to comply with local Chinese laws, but that they were troubled by their own actions, and -- in a rarity for individual tech companies, much less for a chorus -- they all invited the U.S. government to play a bigger role, while being vague about what the role should be."
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Why You & Yahoo Should Like This Human Rights Law
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