So, after a long campaign against one of the world’s most powerful internet companies, the families of two Chinese journalists imprisoned by Beijing’s repressive regime can claim a victory of sorts.

The internet giant Yahoo has finally apologised for its role in the locking up of Wang Xiaoning and Shi Tao, following a US congressional investigation and a series of revelations about how it willingly passed information to the Chinese government that helped them track down and arrest these political dissidents.

Of course, the settlement will be scant consolation for the families of the two journalists — who are still serving 10-year sentences — but at least it raises the ugly question of the Silicon Valley’s cooperation with China’s authoritarian regime.

While it seemed more than a little rich for a Congressman to label the Yahoo CEO, Jerry Yang, a “moral pygmy”, the truth is that every internet company now looking at the Chinese market is being forced to compromise its principles. Google, the fifth largest company in America, has successfully rebuffed a request from the US government to get access to data on millions of internet searches, and won’t remove anti-semitic pages, but willingly censors its index for Chinese surfers.

But though companies in the West make the pretence of undergoing moral conflict — wringing their hands over the consequences of their actions, before eventually deciding that profit is more important — the situation inside China is often not even as encouraging as that.

High-profile Chinese internet entrepreneurs such as Jack Ma, the founder of AliBaba.com (China’s biggest website, also owner of a majority stake in Yahoo China) have said that they are happy enough with the situation as it stands. Websites run, the authorities censor them, money rolls in; it’s just the regime they live under.
It’s true enough, but some entrepreneurs — like Isaac Mao, who is in London this week for a talk at the British Museum — have been able to challenge the system without being thrown in jail.

The suppression of online information is fast becoming a crucial political question, with China now the world’s second largest country on the internet population, and expected to overtake America within just a few years.
As a result of such growth and success, Beijing is now setting the standard for dozens of countries around the world who are following suit and heavily censoring the internet — Saudi Arabia, Iran, Vietnam, Syria, and Myanmar.

What happens to the web when its most powerful group of users live under a regime that keeps them blinkered?
Somebody needs to take a stand. But if the Silicon Valley’s finest are happy to pocket profits from repression, and China’s internet elite are unable or unwilling to help, who will fight for us?

Guardian