Captain's Blog

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Captain's Blog - Yahoo Leader Feeling Heat Over Nazi-China Question

Online News Squared: Yahoo Leader Feeling Heat Over Nazi-China Question

CEO of Yahoo made a somewhat inadequate response to a question about providing data on dissidents to China. What if it were Nazi Germany:

"Yahoo has a basic obligation not to have a point of view on basic content, and to present content ... and aggregate things and to allow people to make their own choices. I don't know how I would have felt then," he told the Wall Street Journal.

An apoplectic Jeff Jarvis: "Good God, man! You don’t know how you would have felt? Who gives a damn about your feelings? This is about human rights. It’s about ethics. It’s about morality. It’s not about content. But now that you’ve brought it up, that’s ridiculous, too."

For starters: - It just does not make good business sense - Business leaders without an ethical stance are not providing a good example to their staff.