One For Truth

"This Item Includes Forbidden Language"

I've blogged very recently about the disgraceful intrusion of corporate self-interest into the rights of the public and the flaccid complicity of our elected officials. The MPAA and RIAA are industriously shrinking the public domain and hacking away at the principle of Fair Use, software companies are busy patenting common-sense business processes, American corporations are monitoring what we do off the clock, and multinational corporations are so slobbering over themselves to "do business with" China that they have spread their legs, metaphorically if not literally, to the Chinese government.

I already mentioned how Yahoo had sold out a Chinese journalist and provided key information that led to his arrest and imprisonment. And now Microsoft has so bent over for the Chinese government that in removing blogs that contained "forbidden language" they have actually removed access to information for readers outside communist China. The full story is here, but the long and the short of it is that Microsoft is becoming more and more draconian in its enforcement of Chinese censorship rules. In the case of blogger Zhao Jing (aka Michael Anti), they not only removed one offensive post but deleted his entire blog from their servers, and not only for Chinese readers but for all readers worldwide.

Of course, China's attempts to regulate speech are hand-in-hand with its attempts to regulate belief. And as corporations sell out political dissenters, so will they sell out people of belief. Count on it. What does copyright have to do with Jesus? Everything.

And so while we sleep and consume and look for sales at Wal-Mart, one after another--like whores to the boulevard, and like cows to the bolt gun--companies obsequiously line up to do business with the communist oppressors in China. Companies like Yahoo, Microsoft.. and of course, Wal-Mart.

posted by Zeke @ 8:46 PM