Google + Censorship = House subcommittee hearing

WASHINGTON -- Google Inc.'s decision to block politically sensitive terms on its new Chinese search site has drawn the scrutiny of U.S. lawmakers, who next month will question U.S. technology companies that help Beijing's censors.

Representatives from Google and other Internet companies have been called to a Congressional Human Rights Caucus hearing on Wednesday and to a Feb. 16 session of the House of Representatives subcommittee on global human rights.

The hearings follow Google's announcement Tuesday that the company will block taboo terms in China such as democracy, Tibet and Falun Gong, and not offer e-mail, chat and weblog publishing services that could be used for political protest (see "Google to launch censored results in China").

Chris Smith (R-N.J.), chairman of the human rights subcommittee, has invited Google, Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc., as well as State Department officials and press freedom watchdog groups, to the Feb 16. hearing, he said in a statement.

Smith, a frequent critic of China's human rights practices, seized on Google's corporate motto, "Don't be evil," saying in a statement that the firm "would enable evil by cooperating with China's censorship policies just to make a buck."

Smith told Reuters, "The question is not whether companies should be promoting democracy. The real question is, Should they partner with the secret police in cracking down on dissidents and enabling human rights abuses?"

Code of conduct

Freedom-of-speech advocates, who have been critical of U.S. companies that have accommodated Chinese authorities, are pressing for U.S. legislation establishing a code of conduct for Internet companies working in countries deemed repressive in annual U.S. State Department human rights reports.

"Our lobbying within the United States is calling for a bipartisan effort to support us in getting the legislation passed," said Tala Dowlatshahi, the New York representative of Reporters Without Borders, a France-based watchdog group.

She said the group was also pressing shareholder groups of those companies to insist on upholding "ethics, principles and universal standards" enshrined in the Geneva Convention.

The legislation envisioned by Reporters Without Borders was spelled out in a Jan. 6 online campaign and calls on U.S. companies to refrain from hosting e-mail servers, filtering search engines, blogs and discussion forums in repressive countries.

The proposal would either ban U.S. companies from selling Internet censorship software to repressive states or force them to make censorship of some terms impossible.

It would also require companies to get Department of Commerce permission to sell Internet censorship equipment or conduct related training in countries deemed repressive by the State Department.

In Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, Google co-founder Sergey Brin told Reuters that China's government had already been censoring the search engine.

The decision to block sensitive terms on the China site "is not something I enjoy," Brin said, "but I think it was a reasonable decision."

* note from yours truly. Yes this link will take you to a story that is almost 2 weeks old, but the hearing is today. I will post more news as I hear about it.