Yesterday, Congress scolded Yahoo, Inc. for cooperating with the communist Chinese government in providing identifying information which led to the jailing of a man who wrote pro-freedom editorials online. Today, the American People spoke up, too, and Yahoo’s stock price dropped dramatically. Yahoo’s stock closed today down 7.69% from yesterday’s already weakened price. I blogged about how Yahoo had trampled the civil rights of its Chinese users earlier this year when the jailed man’s wife filed a lawsuit against Yahoo for its transgression.

It’s good to see Capitalism take a swing at Yahoo for its disregard for civil liberty, and it’s a perfect example of how free markets can help protect our civil rights. Presumably, Yahoo, Inc. cooperates with communist governments’ demands in order to gain access to those markets and, therefore, make more money. But, it won’t be that simple in the future. Yahoo CEO, Jerry Yang, will have to consider the potential stock losses on the open market that might result from such actions. One virtue of Capitalist freedom is that each of us can affect change simply by how we choose to spend and invest our money. Today, many of Yahoo’s stockholders clearly made a wise decision.

The wife of a Chinese dissident is suing Yahoo, Inc. for providing identifiable evidence to the communist government that imprisoned her husband for writing anonymous editorials critical of China’s communist rule.

From Wired News:

Early one Sunday morning in 2002, a phone rings in Yu Ling’s Beijing duplex. She’s cleaning upstairs; her son is asleep, while downstairs, her husband, Wang Xiaoning, is on the computer. Wang writes about politics, anonymously e-mailing his online e-journals to a group of Yahoo users. He’s been having problems with his Yahoo service recently. He thinks it’s a technical issue. This is the day he learns he’s wrong.

Wang picks up the phone: “Yes?”

“Are you home?” asks the unfamiliar voice on the other end.

“Yes.”

The line goes dead.

Moments later, government agents swarm through the front door – 10 of them, some in uniform, some not. They take Wang away. They take his computers and disks. They shove an official notice into Yu’s hands, tell her to keep quiet, and leave. This is how it’s done in China. This is how the internet police grab you.

Yahoo! isn’t the only search engine company guilty of conforming to the rules of communist countries in exchange for access to their marketplace. According to the article, Google also censors certain phrases on its Google China search engine that relate to subjects such as freedom and democracy that the Chinese government prefers its citizens not learn about.

It’s an interesting notion that, ostensibly, the rights our government recognizes for its citizens are God-given and do not dissolve when an American travels to another country, and yet there is no system in place to ensure that big American companies follow the same rules where civil rights are concerned when offering their products to other countries as they would have to follow here. The implication is that either our government believes the people of other countries are innately less than Americans or that our government no longer believes such rights are innate at all. It could be argued that while the US government may recognize those rights it has no jurisdiction for protecting the rights of foreigners, but even so, it does have an obligation to ensure that American businesses do not engage in practices that violate those rights anywhere.

Legal experts are doubtful of Yu’s chances in court. But her presence in the United States puts an inescapable human face on the pain caused by the uneasy alliances American technology companies have forged in the last five years with China’s repressive regime. These partnerships are the price of admission to China’s booming market, but they are not without their casualties.