By: Mike McBride

Mike McBride — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 21:30:41 +0000

I’m not sure that I can be so “sick” at MS for this one. Yes, it would be nice if they didn’t have to censor their MSN-China portal, but since that portal is, in effect, doing business IN China, not in the US, it has to abide by Chinese law, not US Law. You said yourself that when you were allowing those Chinese citizens to use your service at a proxy that you were careful to make sure they weren’t doing anything that would cause your door to be kicked down, well if you were actually located in China and were doing that, it would have been. Since MSN-China is an actual business in China, not censoring those keywords would lead to the portal not existing any longer, period.

Seems to me their only choices other than censoring was to not create an local MSN for China at all. While you could make the argument certainly that maybe that is what they should have done, claiming they should somehow do business in China but break the local law in the process is a non-starter. You wouldn’t have done that, I wouldn’t have done that, no one should be expected to do that.

So if you want them to boycott China, say so. But I wouldn;t expect them to break laws in the countries they’re doing business in just because they’re based in America anymore than I would want companies based in other countries to base their service on their laws as opposed to US ones when they’re doing business with me.

Comments on: Micorosoft and Censorship!

By: Mike McBride