In the last day or so there has been widespread coverage of the acquittal of Yahoo by the Hong Kong Privacy Commissioner in any wrongdoing in the handing over of Shi Tao's account information to the Chinese authorities. I am not going to write about this in detail now. I will say that Yahoo will probably play this down or spin it as absolution. If they spin it as absolution, that will be to return to the old, legalistic defenses that caused so much trouble for US Internet firms when they were being pilloried in the US last year for collaborating with the Chinese authorities. Legalistic defenses don't work well against moral arguments.

Since I am not going to write about this in detail now, what I will do is send you to Rebecca MacKinnon's post. She too cuts to the moral argument:

So again, the issue for me is that Yahoo! chose to host user e-mail data in a jurisdiction where the company would inevitably wind up serving as a conduit for human rights violations. They made a choice. Not all companies have made the same choice. It was not something they "had" to do. They have not ever expressed public regret for having made this choice. Now they say it's out of their hands because the Chinese company Alibaba now controls Yahoo! China. Yahoo! deserves to take a hit on its global brand reputation and user trust as a result.

Some commenters on my previous posts related to the Yahoo! Shi Tao case have argued that Yahoo! has the responsibility to maximize shareholder value, and thus could not be expected to act otherwise. But wouldn't shoe manufacturers better maximize shareholder value if they hired 12-year olds at one cent per hour?  Wouldn't many companies have a better short term return on investment if they didn't treat their industrial waste and just dumped it in the closest body of water? Sure. But at what human cost. It's called corporate social responsibility.

My most recent major post on Yahoo is here, speculating about what might happen if they abandoned China. This post also has links to my previous posts on this issue.

Hat tip: ESWN.