Yeah, just about - if the law is in another country, or at least a bad country like China. Executive summary: Yahoo, like Google, was told by the Chinese government that it had to turn over information on one of its users who protests the government's actions. There is no appeal of such an order; to disobey it is to break Chinese law. Yahoo complied with the request, and the information helped sentence the dissident to eight years in prison, or less if they harvest his organs for the black market.

Yup, that really sucks. So does pretending this is an easy choice.

To fully comprehend how bad this is, look at the statements from Yahoo's spokeswoman:

"The choice in China and other countries is not whether to comply with local laws. The choice is whether to remain in the country or not," Osaka said. "We have a philosophy of engagement. We believe the Internet is a positive force."

Well, actually, the choice was whether to become the enforcement arm of a totalitarian regime, choosing to throw innocent political prisoners in jail in exchange for hard cash, you witch.

That's simply false. The difference between disobeying a US subpoena and disobeying a Chinese one is that the latter is much, much worse for you and sometimes your family.

When companies do business in the United States, they have to obey US laws. When companies do business with corrupt dictatorships, they have to please the corrupt dictator. When Yahoo and Google do business in China, they have to obey the Chinese government. Not the parts they like, not the parts that are US-like - all of it. The choice is to obey the law or leave the country. That's it - that's the entire choice. You play by the rules - as vicious and twisted as they may be - or you don't play. Aravosis can clap as loud as he wants but it won't change the facts.

What Yahoo is saying is that if they were around during WWII, Yahoo would have helped Adolf Hitler because there were laws on the books backing up Hitler's policies - and spare me the "don't say Nazi" crap, we are talking about communist China, it's the same thing, Yahoo is saying they will obey any law passed by a dictatorship, no exceptions, so long as they can do business in the country. Yahoo would have no problem with helping kill people in Darfur? No problem working with Iran and North Korea to trap dissidents, maybe even trap American spies and American soldiers? Would Yahoo do that if local law required it (and the law most certainly would)?

According to Yahoo's spokesman, if a fast buck is involved, Yahoo will turn in anyone to the state, so long as local law - laws written by the dictatorship themselves - say that Yahoo has to.

Absolutely disgusting.

Yahoo's spokesperson (her name is "Linda Osaka," so nice bit of reading comprehension there, John) emphatically did not say any of this. Yahoo is the gateway to the Internet for hundreds of millions of Chinese people, and Yahoo's philosophy is to provide access to everything they can. The Chinese government's philosophy is to deny access to everything that's not absolutely necessary. If the government kicks out Yahoo and runs the Web services itself, it's going to block millions more pages to which the Chinese people deserve access.

Also, it should be noted, as so many people are not, that Yahoo says it knows nothing of the story - it comes from Reporters Without Borders, which says only that it "discovered" the information. That's enough to ask questions, but not to convict - at least, outside of China. (Update: Yahoo has responded, though not to this specific allegation.)

There's no perfect solution to this. Some GOP China-hawk is proposing legislation to force companies like Yahoo to move their Chinese E-mail servers out of China and back to the US, an idea that's going to go over really well during continued revelations of the US government spying without a warrant on just about any communications it can find. (And you can imagine the reciprocal reaction if, say, China bought Google and moved all the Gmail servers to China.) If Yahoo truly finds out that obeying Chinese law leads to the jailing of dissidents, the company may leave the country, or it may shut down the free E-mail and chat room services it offers - but that, in turn, cuts off electronic communications to millions of people who may be spreading freedom below the Chinese radar.

I don't think anyone's "right" here, but this petulant insistence that Yahoo's policy is to murder people for profit is reprehensible. It cheapens the risk that Yahoo's Chinese employees take every day to provide as much free speech as that country will allow, and it cheapens everything else Aravosis writes (because, as he was fond of saying about the manwhore Jeff Gannon, if he was so tragically wrong one time, why should you believe him the rest of the time?)

(Via AMERICAblog, which I still read while hoping Aravosis returns to reality)

Go read, and then go do.