How much is your soul worth? Ever thought of auctioning it on Ebay?

Well, don't advertise it for sale on Yahoo.

Souls come pretty cheap there.

Thanks to Yahoo ratting him out, a Chinese journalist has been imprisoned for 10 years by Chinese authorities. His "crime"? He revealed supposed "state secrets" by using his Yahoo e-mail account to post a government order barring Chinese media from marking the 15th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.

Yahoo Hong Kong told authorities it was journalist Shi Tao who did it.

Yahoo Inc. chief Jerry Yang was quoted by Yahoo News as saying he is concerned with the safety of Internet users in China.

For all the good it did Shi Tao.

When it comes to tyranny, journalists are the proverbial canary in the mine: Crackdowns on freedom begin with crackdowns on the flow of information.

We are sad to note that the Paris-based organization Reporters Without Borders has documented 110 journalists currently being imprisoned around the world. Disgracefully, the United States - land of the First Amendment - is on the list, with the imprisoning of the New York Times' Judith Miller.

But China casts an especially forlorn shadow over press freedom, with 31 journalists behind bars.

Internet providers and search engines should be all about freedom. The Internet has the capacity to free and keep free many oppressed people around the world, through the flow of empowering knowledge and information. To see the Internet used for the opposite purpose - to crack down on freedom - is a sad development indeed.

To have an Internet company such as Yahoo be complicit in the crackdown is particularly dispiriting.

Yahoo's Yang says the company is simply complying with "local laws." So were those who did the Third Reich's dirty work.

There's a lot of money to be made in China.

But how much income is needed to compensate for one's soul?