Since Yahoo CEO (for the nonce) Jerry Yang was spanked in public, at a Congressional committee meeting in the U.S. led by Tom Lantos (G-d rest his soul - we’ll miss him before long), at which Yang was forced to apologize to Shi Tao’s mother and was called, along with his confederates, “moral pygmies,” the company has set up a fund for the vicitms of internet repression.  And all it took was a lawsuit and public humiliation by the United States Congress.

I may be wrong, but I can find no current information that this “humanitarian relief” fund has actually been set up. (If anyone has evidence that this thing is real and it’s actually handed out money, please let us know.) I suspect this newest PR move by these companies will be about as sincere as the relief fund. I’d be delighted to shout how wrong I was from the rooftops. Here’s hoping.

More from ReadWriteWeb.

When some of the world’s top technology companies, including Yahoo!, Intel, Nokia and Ericsson, formed the Beijing Association of Online Media three years ago, the group seemed to be a typical trade association, sponsoring social activities and facilitating networking. Even when its activities widened last year to include “self-policing” the Internet, it seemed to be benign, targeting content that “contradicts social morality and Chinese traditional virtues,” i.e. pornography. The message was that the companies were providing a public service in spaces used by Chinese teens, not helping the government maintain political control.

Yet today it is clear that BAOM has become an active agent of the Chinese government’s initiatives to stifle discussion of political issues. The group’s slide into censorship shows how easily Beijing can co-opt Western firms into this effort. And BAOM is becoming a model in a new push to tighten control over Internet speech.

This well-researched article establishes how enthusiastically these companies cooperate with Beijing to not simply censure unorthodox thought, but shore up Chinese governmental orthodoxies. It is clear that these companies are active partners in the curtailment of communication that the Internet was once thought to make undeniable. 20,000 different examples of “politically forbidden Internet content” have been reported to the authorities “through a 200-strong team of Internet monitors (who) maintain informal links with the Beijing Public Security Bureau and are on the government payroll.”

The settlement featured the offender-who-got-away-with-it’s favorite phrase, “Terms were not disclosed.”

The two journalists and a family member sued the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company earlier this year after Yahoo HK, Yahoo’s subsidiary based in Hong Kong, gave Chinese authorities emails containing pro-democracy literature. The jailed journalists alleged in the lawsuit that jailers have tortured them and that Yahoo was responsible.

It goes without saying that Yahoo admitted no culpability. For anything.

So, although it’s hard to say exactly, it seems that what happen was: Yahoo paid the families to stop talking about what Yahoo did to their family members. This is no indictment of the families. At least they made Yahoo pay and have the money to make Shi and Wang’s lives inside possibly less ugly and the families’ lives outside also more comfortable. But no justice was done.

Yahoo got away with it.

Update: Wired quotes “a source at Yahoo” for more vague promises.

(T)he company has been “working with the families, and we’re working with them to provide them with financial, humanitarian and legal assistance.”

Yahoo has also agreed to establish a global human rights fund to provide “humanitarian relief” to support dissidents and their families. The source said that details still have to be worked out.

“After meeting with the families, it was clear to me what we had to do to make this right for them, for Yahoo! and for the future,” said Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang in a statement. “Yahoo! was founded on the idea that the free exchange of information can fundamentally change how people lead their lives, conduct their business and interact with their governments.”

“We are committed to making sure our actions match our values around the world. That’s why we are also working to establish a Human Rights Fund to provide humanitarian and legal aid to dissidents who have been imprisoned for expressing their views online,” he said.

Part of the agreement also allegedly contained the provision that Yahoo “would continue to lobby the Chinese government to release his clients. He said that the terms covered many of the issues discussed in the hearing.” What can you say about something like that?

Update: More coverage from The World and Tech Review.

Hang on, now. For a year, Yang has been contemptuously dismissing his company’s actions with a tedious repetition of “respect” for the “laws” of the countries in which it operates. In other words, not only did Yahoo do nothing wrong, it did everything right. Then, when the worm began to turn, he and his shill Michael Callahan unconvincingly began to keen about how they didn’t have all the facts when they testified before Congress last year. And now, there’s something to apologize for?

Due to Yang’s lust for money, in 2005 Chinese journalist Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years in prison for using his Yahoo mail to send notes outside the country. The Chinese authorities stuck their hand out and Yang couldn’t kiss it fast enough. No legal need to comply with this request, much less a moral or even practical desire to maintain independence. No, Yang and his underlings forked over as fast as possible, in order to pleasure the authorities they believed would help them make yet more money.

Prior to that, in 2002 Wang Xiaoning was arrested for using a Yahoo account to advocate for open elections and other political freedoms in China. In both cases, Yahoo or its subsidiary handed over information it was not legally required to give. And even if it had been required, it could have chosen instead to forgo blood money. It did not.

U.S. Representative Tom Lantos, (D) California, a Holocaust survivor and the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, before which Yang testified today, was disgusted.

“A company of Yahoo’s resources should have taken every conceivable step to prevent the automatic compliance with a request from the Chinese police apparatus. To this day, Yahoo has failed to change any of its practices in order to prevent such collaboration.”

“While Mr. Callahan may not have known the relevant facts, other Yahoo employees, in fact, did know the nature of the Chinese investigation against Shi Tao prior to our committee hearing. (Yahoo’s actions were) spineless and irresponsible.”

“”I do not believe that America’s best and brightest companies should be playing integral roles in China’s notorious and brutal political repression apparatus.”

“Much of this testimony reveals that while technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies.”

“Yahoo shares fell 4.6 percent, or $1.43, to $29.93 in Nasdaq Stock Market composite trading,” according to Bloomberg. Let’s hope the bottom falls out and the price of exchanging lives for yet more money is as high for these Corporate Collaborators as it was for Shi Tao and Wang Xiaoning.

Watch video of the Committee’s meeting here. (If you can. It’s a “.smi” file, whatever that is. Doesn’t work for me.)

Update: Clark sent me a link to The World’s coverage. He also wrote a guest post about it on the Technology Review Blog.

According to the CFA statement, the “committee staff will investigate whether officials from the Internet company Yahoo! misrepresented the company’s role in a human rights case in China that sent a journalist to jail for a decade.”

“It is bad enough that a wealthy American company would willingly supply Chinese police the means to hunt a man down for shedding light on repression in China,” said Lantos, who also co-chairs the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. “Covering up such a despicable practice when Congress seeks an explanation is a serious offense. For a firm engaged in the information industry, Yahoo! sure has a lot of secrecy to answer for. We expect to learn the truth, and to hold the company to account.”

Yahoo’s defense was a combination of unlikely ignorance and a convenient belief in the sovereignty of China and its laws. The first element may be disproved thanks to a San Francisco foundation.

Lantos ordered a probe into the matter in August after the Dui Hua Foundation, a human rights group that focuses on China, released a document that it said shows that the Beijing State Security Bureau had told Yahoo in writing that Shi was suspected of “illegal provision of state secrets to foreign entities.”

Joshua Rosenzweig, manager of research and publications for the foundation, said:

We must remember that before Shi Tao there were three other Chinese dissidents about whom Chinese police obtained user information from Yahoo! in Beijing. If we assume that law enforcement agencies investigating these cases followed the same procedures to obtain that information, three other notices would have been provided specifying investigations into subversion or incitement—crimes of a more unambiguous political nature.