6 September 2005 Yahoo! “a Chinese police informant.”

Today Reporters Without Borders accused internet giant Yahoo.com of supplying the Chinese government with the crucial information for prosecuting Shi Tao, a journalist who worked for the daily Dangdai Shang Bao (Contemporary Business News) in Honk Kong.

Last April, Shi Tao, 37 years old, was sentenced to ten years prison because guilty of spreading through the internet top secret material. The top secret material was a Chinese government's message warning journalists of the “risks resulting from the return of certain dissidents on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre”. Shi Tao, using his yahoo email account sent the text to a foreign-based website. Although admitting to have sent it, Shi Tao argued in court against the validity of the claim made by the government that the content was top secret.

Following the publication of the sentence of Shi Tao's trial, Reporters Without Borders accused Yahoo ! Holdings (Hong Kong) Ltd . of providing “ China 's state security authorities with details that helped to identify and convict [Shi Tao]”.

The text of the verdict shows that Yahoo provided the Chinese government with the email address (huoyan-1989@yahoo.com.cn) guilty of posting the forbidden information on a foreign website, and the IP linked to both that email address and Shi Tao's computer. Without such helpful compliance by Yahoo, it would have been impossible for the Chinese government to convict Shi Tao.

In a statement the Media Watchdog called Yahoo! “a Chinese police informant.”

Mary Osako, a Yahoo spokeswoman, told the BBC that “just like any other global company, Yahoo must ensure that its local country sites must operate within the laws, regulations and customs of the country in which they are based”.

Reporters Without Borders commented that such a line of defense cannot be an excuse to free Yahoo! from all ethical considerations.

There are already more than 100 millions internet users in China , which makes the country the second force in the Internet market, just behind USA . However impressive are those numbers, yet that 100 millions users represent just less than the 10% of the whole Chinese population. In the past year the fast growth of its internet market has turne China into the Promised Land for most Internet companies such as Yahoo, Google, and MSN. Yahoo is reported to have spent already more than $1 billion and. Google - with a $7 billion cash-bag from their summer-stock-sales, is not willing to let the whole of the Chinese-cake free for grab to Yahoo.

For Reporters Without Borders this poses the worrying question of how far those companies will go in complying with Bejing for the benefit of their investments?

GN