Skype passes the buck on China censorship

On Sunday I challenged Skype's Jaanus Kase to respond to user concerns that Skype's Chinese-language client being marketed by TOM Online censors politically sensitive words in its text chat function. In my original post, I challenged Skype to be more transparent with its Chinese users about the fact that it is censoring, and to disclose what is being blocked, by whose authority and according to what law.

Jaanus responded yesterday here:

Rebecca -- thanks for all your comments and questions. I have not posted a followup on the comments because I don't have any new info to add to what's already been said. Skype has taken a decision to have TOM Online actively manage its business in China, thus you should be addressing these questions to TOM.

My response here:

Thanks very much Jaanus. However, given that the censorship is happening under Skype's brand name, don't you think that Skype should be taking responsibility for how censorship of your tool is being carried out? Otherwise if you don't want to take responsibility for TOM's practices, shouldn't the tool just be called TOM in order that users are clear about which company truly has control over their conversations??

Am I being unreasonable?

Note that Skype is now part of eBay... I wonder what their socially conscious founder Pierre Omidyar might think about a member of the eBay family delegating political censorship to a local partner and then not taking responsibility for any details of what is being done?

Comments

[simon]

Not at all very reasonable. But hopefully even this form of restricted access to the rest of the World. Can change things. So maybe it is better they are there censored rather then not there at all.

Or maybe it allows the country to pretend that it is free.

[omih]

Not at all unreasonable.

It reminds me of Nike's answer when they were accused of running sweatshops in Asia where the worker conditions were horrific. They answered that they had no factories in Asia.

In reality what was happening was that they were subcontracting. Again all they were doing was looking at their bottom line without working out both the ethics of the situation or the damage to their brand.

Strides have been taken and Nike have worked with contractors and now they have something approaching decent working conditions.

Organisations should not be allowed to get away with this passing of the buck.

You can liken it to Guantanamo too. The practices are deemed okay because they are happening on foreign soil land outside the laws governing America - despite the fact that the attrocities are being perpetrated by Americans. It's a culture of cheating.

[simon]

Just realised the above should say.
Not at all very unreasonable

in the imortal words of homor simpson. DOH

[mahathir_fan]

This form of censorship is sometimes good.

One of the problems with the internet is the lack of accountability.

If there is no censorship, I am sure some anonymous anti China user will go into a chat room and start screaming "DOWN WIT COMMIES!" , "COMMIE KILLS MILLIONS", or "PRESIDENT HU YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED!" or they will throw some anti-Chinese racist remarks.

So instead of the internet becoming a forum to foster better understanding between citizens of the world, it becomes a virtual reality war zone.

More over time, I think I am getting more supportive of the way the Chinese government is handling the issue of censorship.

The reason is that users could still access uncensored internet through proxy servers. If so, it should not be a big deal to the users. It is however a big deal to internet content providers because they can't spread their propaganda to the users as easily as Chinese content providers. But the user can get to the content provider if he is motivated enough.

As for law enforcement, China is still behind America. If someone prints an anti-American government website, he can be found by maybe British spy agents through high tech surveillance programs such as ECHELON who then pass on the information to the FBI who then uses the evidence to obtain FISA. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

China doesn't have any ECHELON program to help them. So it is still possible to remain anonymous and break the law when using the internet in China while it is not possible to be anonymous if you live in a Western nation.

[Chris Langdon]

Mao forbid, Simon, that anyone should point out the truth, that the Chinese Communists have murdered between 40 to 73 million people, as my website, www.chinaisevil.com points out. Simon implies that anyone who does so is stupid. Who is being foolish and naive? Would Simon call someone a racist for pointing out that the Nazis murdered millions? My China site,
on its "Googlegag" page, de-scribes how Google, Yahoo! and MSN have censored my sites and how Google has retaliated against me.
Sincerely, Chris Langdon,
[email protected]

[Chris Langdon]

I apologize Simon. The comments I was responding to were
Mahathir's, not yours

Sincerely, Chris Langdon