Advocacy: China and Freedom of Speech on the Internet

Quick post- Today's CNET news has a perspective piece by Julien Pain, from the group Reporters Without Borders, a watchdog group known mainly for its indexing of how press-friendly countries are. An outgrowth of this advocacy has made the organization a leading voice in freedom of expression protection on the internet, particularly in China. In Pain's article, he details examples of government abuses:

Microsoft censors the Chinese version of its blog tool, MSN Spaces, using a blacklist provided by authorities in Beijing. You cannot enter the terms "democracy" or even "capitalism" in the Chinese version of MSN Spaces as the system automatically rejects these words.

Cisco Systems built the entire infrastructure of the Chinese Internet and allegedly supplied the Chinese security services with equipment that
enables them to monitor Internet users.

Finally Google, which has always refused to censor its search engine, nonetheless agreed last year to eliminate all "subversive" news sources from Google News China.

He goes on to note that Reporters Without Borders has long-fought these sorts of abuses, a battle that has created a monthly newsletter on China's actions sent to the heads of 16 tech companies complicent in freedom of speech restrictions. He concludes that such efforts were in the end, ineffective, as were the scores of news articles about the subject. In concluding the piece, he argues,

what is the best way to get concrete results? We think it is time to involve U.S. congressmen. They could, for example, call on corporations such as Yahoo, Google and Microsoft to define a joint position on the requests they receive from repressive governments, a code of conduct that each of them would undertake and respect. These rules could include a ban on any censorship by them of such terms as "democracy" and "human rights."

If these companies refuse to regulate themselves within a reasonable deadline, it might then be necessary for the Senate or House of Representatives to draft legislation. The threat, at least, should be brandished right away.

I agree in part. I'm not convinced that the involvement of U.S. congressmen will amount to much. A while ago the Metro of Silicon Valley had an engaging account of the politics surrounding the U.S. (lack of) policy dealing with technology and China-namely Cisco CEO John Chambers and Operation Golden Shield, the filtering/censorship ability Pain mentioned. As DK Sweet writes in the Metro,

The House of Representatives Policy Committee stated the official position of the Republican majority in a report dramatically titled "Tear Down This Firewall." But in a sickening display of cowardice and hypocrisy, the report advocates massive government intervention to free the global Internet but stops short of calling for sanctions on the transfer of U.S. firewall and surveillance technologies to China.

The Metro also goes on to note that in the case of Cisco, despite their public stance that they are ammoral in regards to China and do not follow what is done with their technology, Cisco reps routinely tout the filtering abilities of their software to Chinese buyers.

Simply put, there's too much money involved for me to have much faith in Congressional Action. TRUCKLOADS AND TRUCKLOADS OF MONEY that is guaranteeing a strong American presence in the largest growing consumer market in the world.

In the end, I think it's a question of awareness. In the face of rampant child pornography, large ISPs did nothing for a while... until headlines started appearing with the words like "AOL" and "MSN" in the same sentence as "Child Pornography." The same thing with spam. Threatening congressional action of the sort Pain advocates is a questionable move: such legislation will have little to no chance of success, but it will likely bring more attention to the subject.

Congressional Attention is good... but if not backed by general consumer awareness, it won't amount to much. I think the key is to focus in on one large company (say Google or Yahoo) with a stated social justice policy and try to cause even a minor policy change. That might not cause an immediate ripple effect, but it would certainly create an explosion of news articles. Diversifying a newsletter to hit 16 CEOs of major companies is overly lofty- better to take on one company with a really bad record, or one that is likely to make changes, than to cover more companies with less focus.

(Photograph by Filipe Buitrago from Metroactive Online)