Chinese Blogger Slams Microsoft

Wired News reported Twenty-eight floors above the traffic-choked streets of China's most wired city, blogger and tech entrepreneur Isaac Mao sums up his opinion of Microsoft and its treatment of the Chinese bloggers with one word. "Evil," says Mao. "Internet users know what's evil and what's not evil, and MSN Spaces is an evil thing to Chinese bloggers." Mao, 33, knows something about the topic. In 2002, he was one of China's first bloggers, and since then his ideas on harnessing blogs, peer-to-peer and grass-roots technologies to empower the Chinese people have made him a respected voice in the global blogosphere. Today, Mao is a partner in a venture capital firm that funds Chinese internet startups, including a blog-hosting service occupying part of the market Microsoft hopes to move in on with MSN Spaces. The Chinese version of MSN Spaces is linked to the new MSN China portal, launched last month in partnership with Shanghai Alliance Investment, a company funded by the city government here. Last week that partnership plunged Microsoft into the long-standing controversy surrounding the Chinese government's internet censorship policies, after Asian blogs and news reports revealed that MSN Spaces blocks Chinese bloggers from putting politically sensitive language in the names of their blogs, or in the titles of individual blog entries. The words and phrases blocked by Microsoft include "Taiwan independence," "Dalai Lama," "human rights," "freedom" and "democracy." In a statement, lead MSN product manager Brooke Richardson said, "MSN abides by the laws, regulations and norms of each country in which it operates. The content posted on member spaces is the responsibility of individuals who are required to abide by MSN's code of conduct."

Richard TPD blogged There are more than 80 million bloggers in China, and according to Isaac Mao they don't all feel happy about what Microsoft is doing. And obviously many in China care a lot about politics and do want to discuss democracy -- in fact, a lot of them comment to this site and do just that. So I'm not letting Microsoft off the hook yet, and I'm not giving in to the argument that only Westerners care about things like this. As several other have noted here, it's not like people in China have a place to go to complain if they don't like their government's attitude toward democracy and freedom. Let me correct myself; there is a place they can go. It's called jail.

Dean Esmay blogged I hope the foofaraw about the whole thing just makes things worse for the government there.

Rebecca MacKinnon blogged Isaac Mao slams Microsoft - And boy does he slam them hard. Hats off to Microsoft's Robert Scoble, by the way, for admitting he was wrong over the weekend. A lesser man would not have had the guts.

Hopefully the bloggers there can come up with other words which people will know mean those things, but which will get past Microsoft's software censorship