Search Faces Congress Today

The House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights, and International Operations, and the Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, hosts Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Cisco in Washington, DC.

hearing taking place today comes in the wake of Google's establishing servers local in China to better serve users there. To establish the Google.cn presence, the company had to agree to filter certain search results, a decision that Google has said they debated for years before finally agreeing to do so. Many critics called that decision a sell out, even though Google's place in the market has arrived well after Yahoo and Microsoft established local services in China and Cisco began selling equipment to China that the government uses to control the flow of information on the Internet. Google did make a decision not to offer services that can keep personally identifiable information, such as Blogger and Gmail, in China. Yahoo has been vilified for its role in providing such information when legally requested to by Chinese authorities; the information led to the jailing of journalists in two separate cases, a point the Reporters Without Borders representative will certainly bring up during the hearing. Whether the hearing today will feature meaningful discussion of approaches to doing business with countries that aren't as open as the United States, or simply provide a platform for political grandstanding in an election year, will be known after the hearing takes place. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has made some here.") Drag this to your Bookmarks. Add to document.write("Del.icio.us") | Yahoo! My Web David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.