Yahoo agrees to China censorship

The aspiration to a borderless Internet has fizzled along with technology stock prices. Commercial Web sites are eagerly recreating real-space national boundaries in cyberspace, so that they run Japanese ads for people who log on in Japan and German ones for Germans. National regulators are tightening control, asserting their right to tax e-commerce sites in their countries and the right to “wiretap” e-mail with suspected criminal connections. For the most part, this is good: There’s no reason why societies that choose to ban child pornography in real space should decide that the same material in cyberspace is fine, or why bricks-and-mortar stores should pay sales taxes while clicks-and-mortar stores escape them. But this principle can sometimes go too far. It’s ironic that the latest company to cross the line is none other than Yahoo. Washington Post editorial