terry semel at web2

Yahoo CEO Terry Semel's Web 2.0 talk has been well blogged elsewhere. He didn't say much that I found surprising, but I did choke a bit on his views on China and censorship. Semel said, very roughly:

International publishers that distribute in China, should observe the laws of China (and other countries). No matter if you are a media company, an internet company, whatever, there are laws in other countries that you have a legal and moral requirement to observe. Sometimes on a personal level I wince… China is already the 2nd largest internet population, 400M mobile devices, so you can't ignore it. Part of our role in any form of media is to get our ideas in there, let them see our Western culture. It’s like the Iron Curtain, where we slowly over time put our culture, our ideas in there and it changed the Soviet people's views of the West.

So what I heard between the lines was, we need to follow their laws whether or not we think they are bad, because it's a huge market. Anyway, we'll win in the long run through cultural imperialism.

Did I get that right?

Posted by Gene at October 6, 2005 11:28 PM