Censorship or Safe Business Practices?

As predicted, I've not touched my new MySpace account since my last post.

In other news:

Parts of the Flickr community are in an uproar because the company's management decided they needed to remove the ability for members in Germany, Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea to turn off their SafeSearch option. Specifically, "If your Yahoo! ID is based in Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong or Korea you will only be able to view safe content based on your local Terms of Service so won’t be able to turn SafeSearch off." In other words, no access to moderate or restricted content.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I don't like the idea of censorship; but, knowing a little bit about doing business in other countries because of my own job at an online company, I don't think Flickr is necessarily to blame here. Governments have different restrictions on what and how content can be accessed online. And businesses have to try to do their best to abide if they wish to continue to ply their trade in these countries. Businesses generally error on the side of "overabundance of caution" when in doubt, because they have obligations to their customers, their employees, and their investors. Do they always handle it the way the customers would want? No. Do they always handle it correctly? No. But most of the time, they try to do their best. It's not in a company's best interests to alienate its customers, so they don't go into these decisions lightly. The online world is an extremely tricky business environment, and nobody will ever be 100% happy. But wouldn't it be worse if a company like Flickr couldn't do business there at all?

The German contingent of Flickr is particularly in an uproar, the most vocal of whom are nearly all claiming that German law does not require Flickr to take such draconian measures to protect themselves. Perhaps they're right, but I'd venture a guess that most of them are not attorneys in their native country, so I'd also be willing to bet they don't know for sure. I'm also a former lawyer, albeit not in Germany, and I have yet to hear of any law that is that clear-cut.

Again, I don't fully know how I feel about this yet, but as a marketer in an international online business, I want to give Yahoo/Flickr the benefit of the doubt that they have their customers' interests at heart and are just doing what they feel is necessary to be able to stay in business in the countries in question.