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U.S. Tech Co. Int'l Business Plan: 1) Ignore Human Rights 2) ??? 3) Profit! |
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Posted by Rob_Kendall on Thursday, February 23 @ 17:55:06 EST
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Last week the House
Committee on International Relations held a hearing
on the Internet and China. I watched
much of it with a mixed reaction of loathing,
cynicism
and a small glimmer of hope.
The hearing was called as part of an increasing level of media
and governmental
scrutiny directed at large tech companies doing business in repressive
societies, and who have been complicit in identifying
dissident bloggers, removing
their postings, censoring
web searches and controlling net access.
The testimony presented by the U.S. technology giants of Microsoft,
Yahoo!,
Google
and Cisco
was a lovely example of pleading in the alternative. Essentially:
‘We didn’t do anything wrong; and even if we did do something wrong, we
didn’t have a choice; and even if we had a choice, we made the best
choice; and even if it wasn’t the best choice, this will lead to better
choices; and even if it doesn’t lead to better choices, it’s the
government’s problem anyway.’
(Continued...)
More specifically, the companies begin with the premise that they are
just doing business with China and that they simply must act as
“required by applicable law.” Sometimes the price of doing
business includes censoring content or turning over the personally
identifying information of users to the authorities. Of
course, search engine censorship will be done “in a way that impacts
the results as narrowly as possible” and although facilitating the
political
imprisonment of bloggers is unfortunate, “in practice, when
companies face law enforcement requests of this kind, there is little
room to question the motivations
or and (sic) second-guess the judgments made by officials in these
cases.” Meanwhile, the companies reaffirm their heart felt
intention to “actively explor[e] the potential for guidelines that
would apply for all countries in which Internet content is subjected to
governmental restrictions.” And even if the desire to make a
Yuan or
two trumps human rights in the short term, ultimately “the trend of
history and the impact of technology will continue to come down on the
side of greater openness and transparency.” Oh, and of course at
the end of the day, it’s really up to the “U.S. government to take a
leadership role on a government-to-government basis” in order to affect
change.
Spin as they might, the industry representatives (who I assume drew the
short straws in rather unpleasant internal meetings) were not spared
the venomous ire of Representatives Christopher
Smith and Tom
Lantos. In rhetoric that is usually reserved for
condemning P2P
file-sharers, Lantos asked how the corporate leadership could
sleep at night while acting as willing accomplices to Chinese
oppression. (Personally, I’m guessing that bags of money make
better pillows than most people suspect.)
The cynic in me questions how a government that has conferred most favored nations
status on China since 1980 can really be that righteous when
tech companies go and do business under the laws of such a
country. When the U.S. regularly condones trade with countries
that allow children to manufacture luxury goods in sweatshops,
or permit union
activists to be dragged
off in the dead of night, or export billions of dollars in
oil
while ignoring human rights, how does a little Internet censoring even
compare? But maybe there is a difference.
Maybe the Internet is exceptional in that it is not just a tool of
communication and culture, but a tool that transforms communication and
culture. Perhaps instead of approaching this as an issue of
business as usual in the marketplace of goods, this is an issue of the
unusual business of the marketplace of ideas. In other words,
Nike
and Coke may take
advantage of repressive societies, but Microsoft and Google are being
used to perpetuate repressive societies. And that just really,
really, really feels wrong at some deeper more disturbing
level.
It appears though, that for tech companies the bottom line, is, well,
the bottom line. So absent some monetary counter incentive to
compliance with restrictive regimes there probably won’t be any real
change in the way business is done abroad. Both Yahoo! and Google
conclude their hearing statements with odd pleas for government
intervention that almost seem to shout ‘save us from ourselves’.
Google tells us that the “United States government has a role to play
in contributing to the global expansion of free expression” with the
subtext being that they can’t or won’t alter business practices
themselves. After the hearings Representative Smith made
available a draft of the “Global
Online Freedom Act of 2006” (HR4780) that addresses those
pleas. The bill contains practical measures like requiring
servers that contain personal data to be hosted outside of restrictive
countries; punitive measures that allow for civil and criminal
liability for the release of data that results in political
persecution; and perhaps most poignantly, licensing and export controls
that may actually alter the bottom line on doing business
abroad.
Whether or not this type of bill will ever pass or be effective is of
course unknown. But it does force the point that tech companies
are playing a game of ‘chicken’ with human rights interests that may
result in more painful external regulation than would be necessary if
they simply abided by their own corporate
manifestos.
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