OneWorld.net (U.S.)

SAN FRANCISCO, May 27 (OneWorld) - Executives at Yahoo's annual shareholders meeting Thursday turned down a request from the human rights group Amnesty International, which is demanding the world's most visited Web site stop censoring the Internet and referring dissidents to the Chinese government.

"If you go to Yahoo China and put the words 'democracy,' 'human rights,' or 'Tiananmen Square' into their search engine the results that come back are totally censored," said Amnesty's Anthony Cruz, who addressed the meeting.

Of particular concern to Amnesty is the case of Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist now serving ten years in prison for sending politically sensitive information in an e-mail using a Yahoo account.

Amnesty claims at least 50 "prisoners of conscience" in China have been arrested with the help of Yahoo. Among them, civil servant Li Zhi, who was jailed for eight years in 2003 after posting comments that criticized government corruption.

During the meeting Yahoo executives said they were concerned about the issue of human rights in China, but that they had no choice but to cooperate.

"The choice in China or other countries is not whether to comply with law enforcement demands for information. Rather, the choice is whether or not to remain in a country," the company said in a statement following the meeting.

"We balance the requirement to comply with laws that are not necessarily consistent with our own values against our strong belief that active involvement in China contributes to the continued modernization of the country--as well as a benefit to Chinese citizens--through the advancement of communications, commerce, and access to information."

That explanation doesn't hold water with Amnesty's Cruz, who said Yahoo was only concerned with profits and called the company "accomplices to the pure act of censorship."

Danny O'Brien of the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation said Yahoo's policies toward China are different from those toward other governments that censor the Web. "Generally speaking, Internet companies benefit from the fact that it really doesn't matter where you put servers," he said. "Normally if you face a difficult government in one country, you simply provide it from servers based in another country."

O'Brien said search engines based overseas are regularly blocked by the governments of Singapore and Iran, for example, but "it's rare for companies to bend over backwards to ingratiate themselves to authoritarian regimes."

Leading U.S. Internet companies, including Microsoft and Google, have made similar concessions to the Chinese to help with online censorship.

Earlier this month, Cruz addressed shareholders at the Google annual meeting, where co-founder Sergei Brin avoided Cruz's demands and instead pointed the finger at Yahoo for helping put Chinese Web users in jail.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Danny O'Brien told OneWorld that Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft have made different decisions on how to operate in China. He said that while all three allow censorship of their search engine, "Yahoo handed over private e-mail to the authorities, which lead to imprisonment of dissidents. Google decided not to introduce Google mail in China."

"Neither Google nor Microsoft keep personal information in China," he added.

O'Brien said the three companies have shown a different respect for their users' privacy here in the U.S. as well, noting that when the Department of Justice demanded details on who was using the Internet to look at pornography last year, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL complied, while Google resisted.

The Justice Department initially requested a list of terms entered into the search engine during a single week (potentially tens of millions of queries) along with a million randomly selected Web addresses from various Google databases. After Google forced it to court, the federal government cut down the scope of its sweep to just 50,000 Web addresses and 5,000 search terms.