European Union slams Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft over China

European Union slams Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft over China

A senior EC official has criticized the highflying tech giants from United States over their policies for the Chinese market. EC vice president Margot Wallstroem claimed in a Blog entry that these companies have changed their policies to operate in the ever-growing Chinese market by helping the government in silencing their critics on the internet.

Wallstroem said that the companies were matching the non-democratic policies of the Chinese government with their operations in China. She even went to the extent of claiming that these firms seem to have deleted words such as “ethics” and “corporate social responsibility” from their codes of conduct to suit the requirements of Chinese government.

She has urged the companies to get their actions back on track and does not submit to the pressures from the government very unpopular for suppressing their citizen’s rights. We have seen instances of Google changing their search engine and news engine’s results to hide anti-Chinese content.

Yahoo! also was in controversies sometime back when they were claimed responsible of helping the Chinese government sue a reporter and jailing him for 10 years. The search engine giant apparently gave the Chinese government access to mailboxes of Shi Tao hosted on their servers on Yahoo! Mail. Microsoft is criticized for blocking certain words like “freedom”, “democracy”, and “demonstration” on their Blogging services targeted at Chinese audience.

Ms Wallstroem also wrote in the post that the firms “have flexible ethical standards depending on where they operate” and urged the companies to read the UN Global Compact, which stresses the need for uniting business goals and human rights.