Western Companies Sell Their Souls for the Massive Chinese Market

(February 20, 2006) Even with the full weight of the Communist regime behind it, the censorship effort would have been futile without equipment and know-how supplied by Western vendors like Cisco Systems Inc., SunMicrosystems Inc. and Nortel Networks Corp. And with the world’s three dominant Internet companies – Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft – in a blind rush for a piece of China’s spectacular wealth, Beijing has found all the willing accomplices it needs to strip the Internet of its anonymity, its freedom, and to turn it into yet another tool of repression.