Microsoft unveiled new company guidelines yesterday intended to spell out how it will deal with government censorship demands, in China and anywhere it does business, and limit the impact of its compliance.
It was responding to criticism that followed its decision to shut down five weeks ago, at the Chinese government's request, the online journal of a popular blogger in Beijing who used the Microsoft network.
Among the changes outlined by the company's general counsel, Bradford L. Smith, at its Government Leaders Forum in Lisbon yesterday were a commitment to block content – typically blog or personal Web site content – on its MSN Spaces service only when served with "legally binding notice from the government indicating that the material violates local laws, or if the content violates MSN's terms of use."
The company is also developing technology that would block content within the country making the request, while preserving the ability of the rest of the world to view it. Microsoft also said it would develop a system of "transparent user notification," so that users whose blogs have been shut by government order will be notified by message when they try to access their sites, rather than face an inexplicably dead link.
The new policies would not have prevented the censoring of the Chinese blogger, Zhao Jing, who also works as a research assistant in the Beijing bureau of The New York Times.
But Mr. Smith said that issue and other recent events had led the company to take "a thoughtful step back."
"We have now, I think, a principled grounding for us to work with MSN Spaces and blogs," Mr. Smith said in a phone call from Lisbon. He added that given the field of other Internet technologies expanding into the global marketplace, "we may need to complement those principles with specific additions for those particular technologies."
"This is not a single-country or a single-company issue," Mr. Smith said.
The Microsoft announcement comes just a week after Google said that it would enter the Chinese market with an altered version of its search engine that filters words and subjects deemed inappropriate by government censors. And there has been growing concern in the last year over how far American technology companies appear willing to bend to demands by the Chinese government to gain access to its booming market.
The Congressional Human Rights Caucus, co-chaired by Representative Tom Lantos, Democrat of California, and Representative Frank R. Wolf, Republican of Virginia, will hold a hearing on the issue this afternoon. Representatives from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Cisco all declined invitations to attend.
The House subcommittee on Global Human Rights has also scheduled a hearing for Feb. 15, and has invited all four companies to testify.
The committee, unlike the caucus, has subpoena power. "It's certainly an option," said Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for Representative Chris Smith, Republican from New Jersey and the chairman of the subcommittee. "At this point it's not part of the discussions."
None of the four companies has yet agreed to give official testimony before the committee, Mr. Dayspring said.
On his MSN Spaces blog, Mr. Zhao, the blogger whose site was taken down late last year, had made comments about a recent newspaper strike that the Chinese government deemed inappropriate. Chinese authorities called an MSN Spaces affiliate in Shanghai, and after a short consultation with executives in Seattle, Mr. Zhao's site went dark across the globe.
Mr. Smith said that the legal process was valid and would be followed similarly under the new guidelines. But, he said, using technology the company has been working on "over the last several weeks," Web surfers seeking to read blogs on MSN Spaces servers – which are located in the United States – will be granted or denied access based on their geographic location.
Had this system been in place after the government's takedown request last December, surfers in China would not have been able to view Mr. Zhao's blog, but it would have remained viewable in other countries. Mr. Zhao, however, would no longer have access to or be able to update the site.
He would see only a message that his site had been terminated by government request.
"One of the things we've looked at is, How far does a government's jurisdiction reach?" Mr. Smith said. "In most countries, a government has jurisdiction over the flow of information to its users, but no country has legal jurisdiction over the flow of information to users over the rest of the world."
The guidelines were praised at the Lisbon conference by Mary Robinson, the former United Nations high commissioner for human rights, who said they were "deeply significant."
But Julien Pain, head of the Internet desk at Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based press freedom group that has been monitoring Internet censorship and the imprisonment of bloggers in China called the development an "illusory victory."
"There's a good side and a bad side," Mr. Pain said. "It's clear that they've begun thinking about their ethical responsibility. But it also shows that they accept censorship, and that they believe in this new form of the Internet, in which the rights of users will vary according to their geographic origin."
This, he said, "is in direct contradiction with the original idea of what the Internet was supposed to be – something with no barriers, no boundaries."
