Are you happy about the way Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft do business in China?
If not, write directly to the companies and tell them so writes Kate Allen, director of Amnesty International UK. Many of you will be their customers, so they should be interested in hearing from you.
These companies talk about freedom of information and the massive communication benefits that the internet can bring - in fact they have made their fortunes precisely because of the internet's power to spread people's opinions and knowledge.
But when it comes to China, it seems they just do what they're told - shut down blogs and websites, filter searches and in the case of Yahoo!, help to send people to prison just for the content of an email.
The companies argue that they have to abide by local laws and it's better for them to be in China than not - that by 'bringing the internet to China' they are helping the Chinese people and ultimately helping to affect gradual change from within.
But this argument just doesn't hold water: China had access to the internet for 10 years before these companies were trying to do business there.
The reality is that they are trying to get a slice of a very lucrative and rapidly-expanding market. Having yet another censored search engine or another ISP that takes down blogs at the behest of the government is not affecting change from within - it is pandering to repression.
We're not saying 'don't do business with China' - we are saying, let's have some transparency, from companies who claim in their corporate literature to be right behind internet freedom.
Yahoo! says: 'we believe the internet is built on openness, from information access to creative expression'. It claims 'to respect the privacy of our customers'. Yet it censors search results on its Chinese search engine and has provided details from private email accounts that have helped send two journalists to prison.
Google and Microsoft are sadly similar - talking the talk about openness and freedom in their company literature, while toeing the line when the Chinese authorities ask them to censor searches or take down blogs.
Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft should come clean and reveal exactly which words are censored from searches and banned from blogs.
We hope that when their own customers start telling them to do this, they'll be forced into action. Go to www.irrepressible.info and find out how.
