Congressional Human Rights Caucus condemned all the leading as well as other search engines such as Google, Microsoft, Cisco, and Yahoo! for infringment of human rights by collaborating with China to censor the internet. The Congress representative Tim Ryan said: "They should not let profits take precedence over traditional democratic values such as freedom of speech."

Google was at the most receiving end in this public expression of codemning the search engnes. It has been accused of agreeing to the Chinese Govt.’s cencorship of search eresults in the search engine’s version customized for Beijing. Microsoft (MSN Search) and Yahoo have also ben accused on similar account. In fact, last year Yahoo received major condemnation from human rights forums for allegedly providing online information to the government that allowed it to find and jail a Chinese journalist critical of the government. Cisco is also accused of "helping the government track cyber-dissidents".

Another congressional representative Tom Lantos accuses the search engines for looking at only the power and influence, wealth and high visibility perspective of the whole scene and neglecting the positive impact of the actions human rights activists undertake in China everyday. He further adds, “They caved in to Beijing's demands for the sake of profits."

Though the search engine companies did not partiipate in the Congressional meting they sent out joint press release urging the US Govt. to take a government-to-government stand and a leadership role in this regard. They added, “We want to assure members of Congressional Human Rights Caucus and the public at large that we do not consider the internet situation in China to be one of 'business-as usual'." MSN went a step ahead and stated, “We will only pull content from MSN when it receives official legal notice that content breaks local laws or MSN's terms and conditions".