...that sincerest form of flattery
Anne Applebaum has an Op-ed today in the Washington post titled Let a Thousand Filters Bloom. Hmm... sounds a lot like the title of my recent article, China's Internet: Let a Thousand Filters Bloom, which I wrote last month for Yaleglobal Online, and which has since been reprinted in various versions in the International Herald Tribune, the South China Morning Post (pay-to-read, boo hiss), Asia-Pacific Media Network, and others.
I'm glad A.A. agrees so much with my argument that she makes a lot of the same points, drawing upon some of the same sources I cited in my article and a lot of information subsequently discussed on this blog and in several other recent news articles, then adding some new updated information to advance the story.
It's a forcefully written Op-ed. She points out that Microsoft, Cisco, Yahoo! and others insist they're doing nothing illegal while helping to build the censored Chinese cyberspace, and concludes:
If this isn't illegal, maybe it should be. After the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the United States passed a law prohibiting U.S. firms from selling "crime control and detection" equipment to the Chinese. But in 1989, the definition of police equipment ran to truncheons, handcuffs and riot gear. Has it been updated? We may soon find out: A few days ago, Rep. Dan Burton of the House Foreign Relations Committee wrote a letter to the Commerce Department asking exactly that. In any case, it's time to have this debate again. There could be other solutions -- such as flooding the Chinese Internet with filter-breaking technology.
Beyond legality, of course, there's morality. And here the judgment of history will prove more important than whatever Congress does or does not do today. Sixty years after the end of World War II, IBM is still battling lawsuits from plaintiffs who accuse the company of providing the "enabling technologies" that facilitated the Holocaust. Sixty years from now, will Microsoft, Cisco and Yahoo be doing the same?
"Flooding the Chinese internet with filter-breaking technology" won't do much good, IMHO, if U.S. companies continue working as hard as they are now to sell filtering equipment and services to China.
Ugh. I hate it when people rip off other people's writing. It's always done from places the thief thinks are too unimportant for anyone to notice. Maybe the "blogs are just a topic" journalists could take a page from bloggers. Nothing wrong with quoting -- even titles, even a lot of someone's article -- if you've got the lychees to give credit where it's due.
Posted by: Curt | July 21, 2005 at 11:12 AM
hope you don't feel flattered by AA, I wouldn't.
Posted by: Hans Suter | July 21, 2005 at 05:16 PM
Is what Cisco and Microsoft are doing any different to what Rupert Murdoch does in growing his media empire. Namely cosey up the heads of state (whether elected or not) and make promises (of either censorship in dictatorships or support in democracies) and sit back and collect the rewards.
Not saying I condone either but if we're talking about absolute free speech then the net has to be cast wider than just the Internet.
Posted by: omih | July 21, 2005 at 06:59 PM
and again, as I've pointed out before, if they went the TypePad/Blogger route, they'd be blocked entirely. Now 9 out of 10 free-thinking people might say that MSFT was doing this purely to gain market share, but I'll say that they're keeping lines of communication open.
I won't defend Cisco, though.
Posted by: Jon Garfunkel | July 26, 2005 at 10:33 AM
It's certainly possible that she ripped you off. But couldn't it be simply that she played off the same well-known, hardly obscure phrase?
Posted by: Vicki | August 03, 2005 at 03:33 AM