Yahoo! became a public company in April 1996 with around 100 employees. Ten days later, we launched Yahoo! Japan as a joint venture. By the end of the year, we were running Yahoo! businesses in six different countries. Back then, Yahoo! counted about 14 million page views a day, versus the nearly four billion we log today. Bringing the Yahoo! experience to users around the globe has been core to our approach from the get-go. Now more than 500 million users visit Yahoo!-branded properties worldwide every month, with the rate of user growth from outside the United States growing most rapidly.

For all the benefits we enjoy from operating in twenty plus countries and in more than a dozen languages, managing Yahoo! on a global scale creates plenty of challenges around complex and politically charged issues like censorship and user privacy.

How do we deal with obligations to follow laws of nations where the laws themselves or their application may have consequences inconsistent with internationally recognized values and standards? Are partially censored results, with notice to users, better than no results at all in a challenging market? Should we focus our concerns on censorship of political speech? Should companies draw the line on doing business somewhere based on the type of speech a government limits? Would it be a decision based on the quantity or the quality of limitations? And using which standards and measures? Could Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provide a starting point?. Our own First Amendment is quite broad; could that be a global standard? How do companies design product approaches that balance legitimate government rights and requirements for data access with adequate protections for user privacy? Do we agree neither right should be absolute and each should live in balance with the other? Should we design an approach that works in Beijing, Paris, Sao Paulo, Sydney, Toronto, and Washington, D.C. all at once? Is that possible? How far can a company go in challenging local laws and orders? What if it puts locally-based employees at risk? These are just a few of the questions we’ve been asking ourselves recently.

Fortunately, we haven’t had to think about these questions alone. For most of the past year, we’ve been immersed in weekly meetings with top thinkers at Microsoft, Google and Vodafone — right, in some cases our fiercest competitors — to apply our collective wisdom to challenges to free expression and privacy. Early in 2006 we engaged the highly respected team at Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) to facilitate our industry dialogue, and we’ve also counted closely on the academic expertise of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

We’ve looked closely at previous voluntary industry and multi-stakeholder initiatives, actively engaged individually and collectively with a wide group of international human rights groups and socially responsible investors, talked to United Nations business and human rights experts, and consulted closely with the State Department’s Global Internet Freedom Taskforce. The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), which also took a leadership role in convening stakeholder discussions, is now working with BSR to co-facilitate the next phase of a multi-stakeholder dialogue.

Today, our diverse group of companies, human rights organizations, academic institutions, and socially responsible investors announced a formal commitment to creating a set of global principles and operating procedures on freedom of expression and privacy — to guide "company behavior when faced with laws, regulations, and policies that interfere with the achievement of human rights" (check out the press release here). Our goals also include creating an implementation, accountability, and governance framework as well as a forum for sharing ideas. The political principles and human issues at stake are big ones — no two ways about it – and this next phase in the multi-stakeholder dialogue requires continued leadership, integrity, and teamwork from all sides.

Yahoo! is a company built on openness, free expression, and user trust. From our humble trailer roots with a small and devoted group of followers through our teenage years as a global company with hundreds of millions of users, we've seen open access to information transform communities and allow entrepreneurship to flourish as well as provide citizens with more freedom in how they live, work, exchange ideas, and make choices impacting their daily lives. Information can be a powerful tool for change and progress in the hands of internet users globally.

As a broad and diverse set of players at the table today, we’re committed to harnessing the group’s collective experience and brainpower to design an approach to doing business globally that consistently guides ethical decision-making in the business world’s most challenging markets.

Michael Samway
VP & Deputy General Counsel