The Informant’s Business Model

Reporters Without Borders obtained the verdict in the case of Jiang Lijun, a Chinese activist sentenced to four years in prison for posting pro-democracy articles online. The document showed, explicitly, that Yahoo! had handed his identifying information to Chinese police. It wasn’t the first time—it was the third confirmed case.

There’s a word for that. Not "compliance with local law." Informing. And the business logic—we need market access, so we give authoritarian governments what they ask for—is the kind of moral abdication that gets dressed up in corporate language until it sounds almost reasonable. It isn’t.

Microsoft did its part too: censoring Chinese blogs containing the words "freedom" and "democracy," and providing infrastructure that helped the Chinese government build its internet surveillance apparatus. Two of the largest technology companies in the world, actively working to suppress dissent in exchange for a seat at the table.

I dropped Yahoo! and didn’t go back. Microsoft is harder to avoid entirely, but I stopped feeding it wherever I could manage. The argument that you can do more good by staying in the market is a story companies tell themselves. You don’t reform a surveillance state from inside it by handing it names.