blog.forgreatjustice.net

Of the larger companies fueling the progress of Web2.0 technologies, Yahoo! is a major player. Besides their acquisition and support of the biggest technologies - Upcoming, Flickr, del.icio.us - they’re also giving back to the community in big ways, like the PHP and JavaScript Development Centers. Yahoo! is providing a positive model of how a growing company can support a global information-driven economy.

Also, Yahoo has helped the Chinese government find and arrest pro-democracy dissidents. Information drawn from recovered “Draft” email proved that the suspect was planning with a “Freedom and Democracy Party”. The conseqences for him will be very severe. (In all fairness: it’s a lot easier to look out at the politcal natures of other countries, rather than make a clear judgement call about our own societies.)
Could this have been done better? I’m not sure. Business operating in a foreign government need to operate by their rules to stay open, and it’s not clear that denying Chinese citizens access to technology would help anyone, even if this technology is under the sway of the government. There might not be an easy solution here, and I wouldn’t argue for one.

However, I would argue against any utopian technologist who would suggest that networks are some silver bullet for freedom and progress. They can help, or they can just as easily be co-opted by the status quo, and for this reason a good technologist should always keep a good reality check at her side.