| ||||
In the face of more legal action concerning the sale of Nazi memorabilia on Yahoo! Web sites, Yahoo! chairman, then-CEO, and director Tim Koogle, speaking at HBS on February 9, declared that efforts by local governments to regulate the Internet on a global basis would create "a very dangerous slope." [Note: Koogle resigned as CEO on March 7, after this talk took place. He will reportedly stay on as chairman of Yahoo!]
Koogle was apparently unnerved by two questions posed by a student during a question-and-answer session following his highly upbeat keynote address that extolled the potential of the Internet. Twice he asked the student, Jacques Stambouli (HBS MBA '02), to repeat himself. Stambouli's questions were: "Who, if anyone, should police and regulate the World Wide Web?" and "Can you talk about your experience in France selling Nazi memorabilia on Yahoo!?"
Yahoo! was ordered by a French court on November 20, 2000, to block Internet users in France from accessing Nazi memorabilia on its North American sites. According to a report filed by the Associated Press on November 21, Yahoo! was granted three months in which to come up with a means for preventing users in France from accessing pages where Nazi-related material was sold on the Yahoo! auction site auctions.yahoo.com. The suit against Yahoo! in France had been brought by two antiracism groups, the Union of Jewish Students and the International Anti-Racism and Anti-Semitism League.
On January 23, 2001, an additional lawsuit was reportedly brought against Koogle personally, by another group, the Association of Deportees of Auschwitz and Upper Silesia. The new suit, which seeks symbolic damages of one franc (about 15 U.S. cents), reportedly accuses Koogle of "justifying war crimes and crimes against humanity."
 | |
| We've always favored selective legislation ... on basic human levels, and then a lot of self-regulation. | |
 |
|
| — Tim Koogle, of Yahoo! |
Commenting on the controversy for the Cyberposium audience at HBS, Koogle noted that French people who have computers and access to the Internet can go to sites anywhere in the world. While Yahoo!'s French site is locked against Nazi-related material, he said, computer users could access such material on the American and Canadian Yahoo! sites.
"France wanted us to block access of all French citizens to anything in the world that is on Yahoo!'s platform that doesn't adhere to their local policy," Koogle continued. "And so the stage we're at, and we're battling our way through that, [is that] we have changed our policy. The stance we've taken is that we've actually taken anything down from our commerical platform on [which] we make money, so auctions and classifieds and anything related to Naziism is being removed from that.
"It's a change in policy that we went to when we introduced fees, because the editorial stance we've taken is that we don't want, as a company, to be benefitting economically from those things. We're sensitive to it."
Koogle added that the problem of who should police and regulate the Web is "under question." He also asserted that the enforcement of local laws concerning material on the Web was probably unfeasible. Koogle told the HBS audience that he had recently participated in closed sessions in Davos, Switzerland, in which participants discussed the creation of third-party groups to serve as arbiters for the Internet. These discussions, Koogle said, reached "no consensus whatsoever."
"We've always favored selective legislation ... on basic human levels, and then a lot of self-regulation," Koogle concluded.
Later, when student Stambouli was asked via e-mail by HBS Working Knowledge for his comment on Koogle's answer, Stambouli replied, "If you're being specific about his answer to my question, well, there wasn't one. He did his best to avoid it.
"I can't really blame him, though, as even I wouldn't know what to answer. What I do know is that I don't want the Web to become a place where we have to limit our material to what is acceptable to the lowest common denominator. At the same time, I don't want it to become a free-for-all platform to spread hatred, bigotry, pornography, and propaganda without constraints.
"The one answer he sort of proposed — self-regulation — is totally unworkable. While I have trust in the likes of Yahoo!, AOL, CNN, et al. to avoid any offensive material while at the same time promote constructive dialogue, [there are] all the factions, with their extreme views, that cannot be trusted to ‘self-regulate' themselves."
A quick check at press time on the Yahoo! auction site, auctions.yahoo.com, using the search term "Nazi," revealed a list of 61 items, all priced between $1 and $70.
All of the items were coins, except for one "Nazi May Day Pin 1937" featuring an initial bid of $1, which carried the words "Must See" and "L@@K!!!"
· · · ·