‘Microsoft may close shops in non-democratic countries like China’

This is amazing news indeed. Fred Tipson, senior policy counsel in Microsoft has said that concerns over the dictatorial and repressive regimes might reach a point when it would be ‘unacceptable’ to do business in those countries. Citing the situation in China he said; Things are getting bad… and perhaps we have to look again at our presence there. We have to decide if the persecuting of bloggers reaches a point that it’s unacceptable to do business there. We try to define those levels and the trends are not good there at the moment. It’s a moving target. Earlier today, Tipson while speaking at the Internet Governance Forum he had defended Microsoft’s work in China. He also denied that some big companies were conspiring with certain governments for their obvious selfish interests. Art Reilly, senior director at Cisco Systems, joined him in the debate. Incidentally, Cisco and Microsoft drew a lot of flak for selling equipment to Chinese police and censoring blogs respectively. A few months back, Google too compromised itself for doing business there by filtering out pro-democratic words or phrases in its search engine in China. That left a very bad taste in the mouths of many individuals and organizations championing for human rights and freedom. I take this statement by Tipson with a pinch of salt because Microsoft has a lot at stake in China. However, I firmly believe that it is high time that companies boycott doing business with such countries. Forget about the internal suppression of the Chinese people by the government there, the Chinese government is actively supporting dictators and despots like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. In fact, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe dream does not include democratic countries like Britain and the US, but countries such China; and China is happily lapping it up.