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WASHINGTON: Yahoo boss Jerry Yang, whose company once
allegedly helped Chinese police nab and jail cyber dissidents, is
today in the forefront of a global campaign to free those
languishing in prison for expressing their views online.
He has established a “Yahoo!
Human Rights Fund” to provide humanitarian and legal support to
political dissidents who have been imprisoned for expressing their
views online as well as support for their families.
In between his grueling schedules
as chief executive of the Internet giant, the billionaire Yang paces
the corridors of the US Congress, writes to government officials and
meets with human rights groups to champion Internet freedom.
Yahoo also provided $1 million to
Washington-based Georgetown University to carry out research on the
link between international values and Internet and communication
technologies.
“I think that I’m a big
believer in the American values, [but] as we operate around the
world, we don’t walk around having a very heavy-handed American
point of view,” Yang said Thursday as he marked the first
anniversary of the university’s Yahoo fellowship program.
Last November, the US Congress
sharply rebuked the Taiwanese-American Yang and Yahoo, which he
co-founded, over the company’s role in landing a Chinese
journalist Shi Tao, behind bars.
Shi was convicted in 2005 of
divulging state secrets after he posted a Chinese government order
forbidding media organizations from marking the anniversary of the
Tiananmen Square uprising on the Internet.
Police identified Shi by using
information provided by Yahoo. He was sentenced to 10 years in jail.
The US corporation, which
defended its action on the grounds that it had to comply with
China’s laws to operate there, later reached a settlement with the
families of Shi Tao and another cyber dissident Wang Xiaoning to
stop a lawsuit, which charged that Yahoo provided information that
enabled Chinese police to identify the duo.
“As an early Internet pioneer,
Yahoo has been at the forefront as our innovative technologies
opened up new frontiers for citizens of the world,” Yang said.
“With these opportunities also come challenges when these
technologies are used for other purposes, ones that contradict our
core values of access to information and freedom of expression.”
Following Yahoo’s nasty
experience in China, Yahoo is now holding talks with industry
partners, academics, human rights groups and investors to promote an
industry code of conduct governing the behavior of top global
technology and communication companies operating in “challenging
markets,” Yang said.
“We seem to be getting more
gray areas in terms of freedom of expression versus censorship,
legal versus illegal and border versus non-border,” said Yang, who
came to the United States from Taiwan at age 10 and whose net worth
today is about $2.3 billion.
The US government as well as
other states, which believe in freedom, has to play a more important
role in advancing such values, he said.
Recently, Yang asked US Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice to
“redouble our government’s
diplomatic efforts” to pursue the release of Chinese dissidents
imprisoned for posting information and their own views on the
Internet.
“I do believe we can use
technology to improve people’s lives,” he said.
--AFP
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