Sunday, February 26, 2006
American Companies and Censorship
Fellow Berkman Fellow Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN Bureau Chief in Bejing and Tokyo, has an article in The Nation where she looks at specific American companies and how they've done when confronted by the conflict of a 110,000,000 Chinese Internet customer addressable market versus Chinese Government censorship and even jailing of people who blog the wrong stories. She examines Cisco, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google, concluding that even Google, the least-bad of the four, by doing business in China, "has helped to legitimize political censorship."
I'm not sure I agree.
Rebecca asks, "Aren't we better off setting global standards to protect all users from all governments everywhere?" and she suggests that "corporate social responsibility" is a good direction to take. I agree. Governments are more the same than they are different, I fear, so it is not likely that the US government will be a strong advocate for open Internet communication abroad when it is trying to shut it down at home. Thank goodness the US government is not yet jailing many people for political speech.
Corporate Social Responsibility has a long honorable history. Much of it is recounted vividly in Age of Heretics, an undeservedly under-recognized history of corporations and people who tried to change them, by Art Kleiner.
By the way, Rebecca MacKinnon is a speaker at F2C: Freedom to Connect, April 3 and 4 in Washington DC, the Internet Freedom conference by isen.com and pulver.com. [Register now, ONLY 2 DAYS LEFT for deep discount pricing. Use code FOBDL for $295 rate until 11:59 PM EST on February 28. (Compare $1195 on or after April 1. Want Ginsu Knives too?)]
I'm not sure I agree.
Rebecca asks, "Aren't we better off setting global standards to protect all users from all governments everywhere?" and she suggests that "corporate social responsibility" is a good direction to take. I agree. Governments are more the same than they are different, I fear, so it is not likely that the US government will be a strong advocate for open Internet communication abroad when it is trying to shut it down at home. Thank goodness the US government is not yet jailing many people for political speech.
Corporate Social Responsibility has a long honorable history. Much of it is recounted vividly in Age of Heretics, an undeservedly under-recognized history of corporations and people who tried to change them, by Art Kleiner.
By the way, Rebecca MacKinnon is a speaker at F2C: Freedom to Connect, April 3 and 4 in Washington DC, the Internet Freedom conference by isen.com and pulver.com. [Register now, ONLY 2 DAYS LEFT for deep discount pricing. Use code FOBDL for $295 rate until 11:59 PM EST on February 28. (Compare $1195 on or after April 1. Want Ginsu Knives too?)]
Technorati Tags: Berkman, Cisco, DontBeEvil, F2C, Freedom, Google, Microsoft, Politics, Press, RebeccaMacKinnon, Yahoo
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