“You know how the media works,” said Julien Pain, head of the Internet Freedom Desk of Reporters Without Borders, “They forget about things after a few days.”

Pain offered his mordant but accurate comment at a New York press conference this week while explaining why the press freedom group teamed up with a group of investment managers - instead of journalists - to press Internet behemoths like Cisco and Yahoo to monitor their operations in “repressive regime countries” like China.

You may recall recent (albeit short-lived) press attention paid to the role that Yahoo played in the imprisonment of Chinese journalist Shi Tao, sentenced in April to ten years for ‘divulging state secrets abroad’ after posting data on a US-based web site. Detailed information regarding his email account, supplied to Chinese authorities by Yahoo, led to Shi Tao’s arrest. Yahoo managers defended the firm’s collaboration with Chinese state security by explaining that they were simply conforming to Chinese law.

The Yahoo action may have been legal - but was it ethical? After all, this isn’t the first time Yahoo has collaborated with the Chinese regime in its unceasing efforts to censor the Internet. Nor is Yahoo alone. Questions are also being raised about the complicity of other online titans such as Microsoft, Google, Sun Microsystems and the aforementioned Cisco. Microsoft, for example, has acquiesced in the censorship of its Chinese blog tool, which automatically rejects such dangerous words as “democracy.” And Google has agreed to withdraw news media that Beijing considers ‘subversive’ from the Chinese version of its search engine.

Reporters Without Borders began writing, long ago, to the management of companies supplying the technology Chinese authorities need to monitor and punish people like Shi Tao. The first letter to Yahoo, for example, was sent three years ago. To date, said Pain, there has been no answer.

Unhappy with the lack of corporate response, frustrated with episodic and fickle news coverage of the issue, and anxious to help change the situation, Reporters Without Borders decided to try a new approach – partnering with socially minded investment managers to put direct shareholder pressure on the firms. Two investment management firms – Boston Common Asset Management and Domini Social Investments – stepped up to meet the challenge, and have since been joined by two dozen other groups, which collectively represent more than 21 billion dollars in investment.

All have now endorsed a statement calling for greater monitoring of Internet company business practices in repressive countries like China. In addition, Boston Common has notified the Board of Directors of Cisco Systems Inc. that it intends to introduce a shareholder resolution at its upcoming meeting requiring the Board to prepare a report to shareholders “describing the progress toward development and implementation of a Company Human Rights policy and the plan for implementation with partners and resellers by May 31, 2006.”

Cisco’s Board of Directors is of course recommending a vote AGAINST this proposal, calling it “unnecessary in light of our current efforts and established policies, practices and procedures relating to human rights.”

Like many large corporations, Cisco has endorsed the United Nations Global Compact, which commits the company to “support and respect the protection of internationally recognized human rights” and ensure “that they are not complicit in human rights abuses.” Yet resellers of Cisco products in places like China may not be as scrupulous. As a result, as the Boston Common proposal states, Cisco shareholder value may be at risk “if resellers are using our company’s products to commit, or help others to commit, human rights violations as has been alleged in the media and by Amnesty International and other organizations.”

Cisco management’s position has long been that the company simply sells standard equipment and has no responsibility for how it is used. Yet there have been reports (such as “Losing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire and Betrayal, a recent book by Ethan Gutmann) that Cisco has collaborated with the Chinese authorities to “monitor, sanitize and ultimately isolate the Chinese web.”

Is Cisco undermining human rights by providing an abusive Chinese government with tools and training to censor, locate and punish users of the Internet? Is Yahoo - which recently entered the news business itself with the hiring of ex-network correspondent Kevin Sites to cover what it calls “Hot Zones” – helping the Chinese to throw other reporters into prison? Is Google – with a corporate motto that promises to “Do No Evil” - content instead to “See, Hear, and Speak No Evil” of Chinese censorship of the Internet?

China is not alone. Many other countries - from Iran to Tunisia to Myanmar – are actively ‘filtering’ and censoring the Internet, blocking sites that deal with ‘controversial’ topics like human rights and democracy, and punishing citizens and journalists who try to exercise the freedom that the Internet promises. Corporations that assist them – in addition to being complicit in a very nasty business – may also be endangering their own futures and the very shareholder value they were created to maximize.

“Actions that reduce the openness, safety and reliability of the Internet compromise the long-term business prospects of IT sector corporations,” says Dawn Wolfe, a research analyst at Boston Common. “Internet traffic creates demand for IT infrastructure and networks. An increased volume of traffic benefits businesses that profit from that demand. Stifling the openness inevitably reduces traffic.”

The moral case against corporate complicity in human rights abuses, such as suppressing freedom of expression, seems clear – but equally clear is the fact that thus far it has failed to move those making the business decisions. Analysts like Ms. Wolfe believe “the business case is also clear: the long-term growth and viability of IT sector companies depends on an open, reliable and secure Internet.” She says her firm’s goal is to “open management’s eyes to the long-term economic consequences” of collaborating with censorship. Perhaps if Messrs. Gates, Page, Brin, et al start hearing about business concerns from their shareholders – instead of occasionally hearing about human rights concerns from a media beset by attention deficit disorder, among its many maladies – they might start to pay attention. Maybe they’ll even be moved to respond…