KEY POINTS:
When Yahoo's chief executive, Jerry Yang, bowed in apology three times - each bow deeper than the last - the woman began to cry. The mother of jailed Chinese journalist Shi Tao returned the bow, then tried to wipe the tears from her eyes in front of the
US Congressional committee that had been pillorying Yahoo for nearly four hours.
The lesson here was a public shaming for one of the big boys of the high-tech world.
"While technologically and financially you are giants," scolded US Congressman Tom Lantos, "morally you are pygmies."
The "pygmies" in question were Yang and his vice-president and general counsel, Michael Callahan.
The Yahoo executives had been called before Congress for handing over personal email information on Chinese journalists likely to land in prison, into the hands of Chinese authorities. The Congressmen were not amused.
This wasn't the first time Yahoo had offered personal information on journalists that resulted in prison sentences in China.
The World Organisation for Human Rights told the Guardian that while the identities of only a handful have been made public, "it is suspected that hundreds more have been similarly affected".
Business journalist Shi Tao's great sin was forwarding a government memo to a human rights group overseas.
The memo warned journalists not to cover the 15th anniversary of Tiananmen Square.
Shi Tao is now spending 10 years in a Chinese prison for clicking on "send". Yang only had to bow for forgiveness.
When had his internet, touted as a force of political freedom, morphed into a tool of repression?
"If you think our witnesses today are uncomfortable sitting in this climate-controlled room and accounting for their company's spineless and irresponsible actions, imagine how life is for Shi Tao, spending 10 long years in a Chinese dungeon for exchanging information publicly - exactly what Yahoo claims to support in places like China," Congressman Tom Lantos said.
A week after the Congressional shaming, Yahoo agreed to stop fighting a lawsuit on behalf of Shi Tao and another journalist, Wang Xiaoning, dobbed in by Yahoo in 2002. He is now in the fifth year of his decade-long sentence. Yahoo had been refusing to pay the jailed journalists' legal fees or offer apology to any of the families - until now.
"It took a tongue-lashing from Congress before these high-tech titans did the right thing," said Congressman Lantos after hearing of Yahoo's newfound settlement offer.
China may rank in the bottom 10 countries for press freedom [just above Burma], according to a Reporters Without Borders index for 2007. But US internet giants aren't looking much prettier lately when their servers leap over The Great Firewall of China.
China's censored internet firewall - or The Golden Shield as China calls it - isn't new. Reporters Without Borders reports that China's internet Police Task Force employs 30,000 staff. Chinese internet users aren't likely to see the BBC News, Radio Canada, or the United Nations News, let alone Taiwanese or Free Tibet sites.
But today, with the porous borders created by the world wide web, big players such as Microsoft, Cisco and Yahoo can only pay lip service to Google's now fragile-sounding corporate slogan, "Don't be evil".
These internet giants' bottom line is to keep Chinese authorities happy so they can seduce their potential new market. But as an ugly byproduct, two different sets of business ethics have been coughed up, one for home and another for abroad.
Remarkably, last year at China's demand, Microsoft agreed to shutter a free speech blogger, Zhao Jing, from their Chinese servers, even though their company had no physical servers in China itself.
A cold chill spread among human rights organisations when they saw China's censors reach across geographical borders and erase data stored on American soil, from an American company.
US lawmakers are scrambling to redraw the line with the Global Online Freedom Act that would fine companies who disclose personal information to an "internet restricting country" such as Vietnam, Iran, Ethiopia or North Korea, but they may not get far. internet companies will be fighting it.
Their argument is that it's more important to provide access to a broader spectrum of information, though censored, than be forced out of repressive markets by homegrown Chinese competitors such as Baidu and Alibaba.
But hats off to Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, whose site is banned by China because his company refused to be censored.
Wales told the Observer, "We occupy a position in the culture that I wish Google would take up, which is that we stand for freedom of information, and for us to compromise I think would send very much the wrong signal - that there's no one left on the planet who's willing to say, 'You know what? We're not going to give up'."
I hope Shi Tao's mother is listening.
