Washington (DC) - If the US firms that declined to appear before yesterday's Congressional Human Rights Caucus meeting were intending to avoid embarrassment, they may have failed. After having offered polite excuses, generally dealing with scheduling conflicts, all four Internet leaders are facing a barrage of criticism the day after, not only from leaders in Congress, but from media sources and blog correspondents as well.

With the company's staunchest critics regarding their China policy planning to share the meeting room with them, perhaps representatives from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Cisco Systems could not have expected to have been greeted warmly. But their collectively declined invitations (Yahoo joined the other three in declining late yesterday) was interpreted by many observers, and quite a few Congressmen, as an outright boycott.

"The launch last week of the censored Chinese Google Web site," remarked Caucus co-chair Tom Lantos (D - California), "is only the latest sign that even companies that make strong and impressive corporate claims, such as Google's motto, 'Don't Be Evil,' cannot or do not want to respect human rights when business interests are at stake."

"Microsoft used to ask, 'Where do you want to go today?'" added Rep. Lantos. "Will the answer now be, 'With your company's collusion, to a Chinese prison?'" Lantos is said to be Congress' last serving member who is also a Holocaust survivor.

This afternoon, Radio Free Asia quoted a Google blogger located in Changsha as saying, "It is shameful that Google, Yahoo, MSN, and others are collaborating with a repressive regime in China - much in the same way that some firms did with Nazi Germany decades ago. History will send those collaborators to court and, I hope, very soon."

For his part, the meeting's chairman, Rep. Tim Ryan (D - Ohio), opened with more diplomatic words: "After decades of being silenced and sheltered, Chinese citizens recognize the value of the Internet...Online bulletin boards and blogs can serve as anonymous outlets for Chinese citizens to express their opinions and offer their dissent.

"As the number of Internet users grow," Rep. Ryan added, "the sophistication of the People's Republic of China's Internet-monitoring increases accordingly. There are an estimated 30,000 Chinese cyber-police monitoring the flow of information on the Internet. Additionally, the PRC employs sophisticated technological barriers, including software that deletes banned words from websites, blogs and message boards, and routers that block banned sites altogether. Among the censored words and phrases are 'Dali Lama,' 'Tiananmen Square massacre,' 'Democracy,' and even 'Voice of America.'"

In a demonstration of the effectiveness of Google's Chinese filters in abiding by that government's guidelines, Rep. Chris Smith (R - New Jersey) performed a search using Google Images, for both the .com and .cn domains. In searching for China torture, the .com service retrieved several hundred images, pertinent or not. For the .cn search, the engine for Chinese users retrieved just two. "Google is doing a grave disservice to democracy, human rights and individuals in China," Smith commented.

Americans everywhere must face the reality, Rep. Ryan pointed out in his opening, that doing business with China is necessary for establishing a global marketplace. But American companies, he added, need not cast aside American values in the name of profits. People should keep in mind, he noted, that the Internet was created with US taxpayer dollars. "American citizens and lawmakers have every right to demand that US companies use this technology to advance freedom, rather than condone oppression," he remarked. "That's why I'm so troubled to watch as American companies, in my opinion, squander not only their leverage to create positive change but America's moral authority for whether we like it or not, American companies operating overseas reflect on all of us."

Representing companies with words instead of people

In place of warm bodies, the four invited US companies offered written statements to the Caucus meeting, although it does not appear they were read into the record in place of oral testimony. For Google's part, senior policy counsel Andrew McLaughlin - who earlier posted an entry to his company's official blog expressing his own reluctance to embrace Google's China policy - wrote for the Caucus, "In deciding how best to approach the Chinese - or any - market, we must balance our commitments to satisfy the interests of users, expand access to information, and respond to local conditions. Our strategy for doing business in China seeks to achieve that balance through improved disclosure, targeting of services, and local investment.

"While China has made great strides in the past decades," McLaughlin's letter continues, "it remains in many ways closed. We are not happy about governmental restrictions on access to information, and we hope that over time everyone in the world will come to enjoy full access to information...We believe that our continued engagement with China is the best (and perhaps only) way for Google to help bring the tremendous benefits of universal information access to all our users there."

Microsoft and Yahoo issued a joint response to the Caucus which, if argued in person, would have countered Rep. Ryan's argument that US companies represent US interests abroad. Instead, they argued in favor of continuing the current US policy of "constructive engagement" with China, under the theory that the country will be more open to human rights when it is more open with the rest of the world. In their statement, the companies put forth that it should be up to the US government to establish principles for social and economic change, in order to make it easier for US companies that must do business with China to remain competitive. "While we believe that companies have a responsibility to identify appropriate practices in each market in which they do business," the joint response stated, "we think there is a vital role for government-to-government discussion of the larger issues involved...We urge the United States government to take a leadership role in this regard and have initiated a dialogue with relevant US officials to encourage such government-to-government engagement."

Cisco's written message was a reiteration of a prior defense of its business practices in China, stating it has not altered the functionality of routers and other networking equipment sold to China, in order to enable government officials there to keep closer tabs on, or to censor, content en route.

Among the non-governmental organizations and other parties who did participate in yesterday's meeting, were some friendly voices that the companies might have appreciated. John Palfrey, of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, participates in the OpenNet initiative which, among other things, studies the impact of content filtering on Chinese society. In his oral statement to the meeting, Palfrey said, "Increasingly, the Chinese state has turned to private companies that control parts of the middle of the network to assist in its filtering and surveillance practices. These companies find themselves today in an awkward, if not untenable, position on this issue of ethics and human rights. Individual companies can be isolated and pressured by the filtering state and undercut by competitors willing to comply with surveillance and filtering requests."

US Internet companies, said Palfrey, find themselves pressured to compete on a global scale, in countries whose human rights records are less than adequate, but without sufficient support by the US government on how to respond when civil rights abroad may be threatened through the use of their technologies. "Private technology companies cannot today participate in these marketplaces without consequences based upon their actions," Palfrey stated. "Human rights are implicated. Companies in this position have an obligation to figure out what it means to act ethically when they are doing business in a place like China."

To accomplish this, Palfrey suggested that US companies come together to create a joint code of conduct, which would help them to establish standards and practices. Congress can help through passive encouragement, he argued, but not by passing laws which tie their hands and restrict their options. He closed with these words: "Internet technologies, developed by the likes of Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Cisco, and many others, are doing terrific things for democracy around the world...These companies should be, and can be, the darlings of the human rights community for what they can do for human rights in places like China."

But Palfrey's comments probably could not have possibly been given the level of coverage - or, frankly, have carried the weight - of Rep. Lantos' comments in opening the meeting: "These massively successful high-tech companies, which couldn't bring themselves to send their representatives to this meeting today, should be ashamed," he pronounced. "With all their power and influence, wealth and high visibility, they neglected to commit to the kind of positive action that human rights activists in China take every day. They caved in to Beijing's demands for the sake of profits, or whatever else they choose to call it."