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When Google capitulated last year to Chinese government demands that the search engine’s censor its mainland search results, it was a shock to true believers in the march of freedom on the Internet. But it was just one of a series of public relations gaffes by Internet-based companies that are spurring new attempts to press media multinationals, including Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, to adopt a realistic code of ethics for doing business with restrictive governments.

Google is hardly the only offender among companies that once promoted a kind of cheerful anarchy in cyberspace. For instance, a Yahoo! subsidiary has also been cited by Amnesty International and other human rights groups for cooperating with Chinese police to identify a local activist who was then arrested and prosecuted. Other companies that have come under fire for cooperating too closely with China include Microsoft and Cisco Systems.

Tech giants operating in China don’t stress the ethical principles they follow in other parts of the world, particularly in the United States and Europe. Lured by the massive, rapidly expanding market, the Chinese government can take advantage of companies’ desire for profit to compel obedience and use the technology to disenfranchise users. Far from opening up the Internet in China, the actions of Google and others have been a disheartening case of Western companies getting in line with the restrictive practices imposed by the Chinese state on their own large — and dominant — Internet players, like Baidu, the leading search engine.

The efforts at a code of ethics, first announced in January, are centered to a large extent in Hong Kong, where Rebecca MacKinnon, a professor of new media at the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Center, is working to promote an open platform for ideas and discussions. She recently helped bring Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and UK-based Vodafone together to discuss human rights principles in countries where deals with governments are necessary. Other groups participating in development of the guidelines include the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, Human Rights Watch and Reporters without Borders.

The new process is already giving everybody headaches. While the participants have agreed to develop a framework to hold signatories accountable in the area of free expression and privacy, this is easier said than done with a technology that can cross all borders freely until it runs up against oppressive governments. The boiling point is obviously censorship. Search engines in China typically censor search queries on “sensitive” topics to appease the government. MacKinnon and other argue that censorship is actually a threat to the multinationals’ business considerations, and that knuckling under to repressive governments will eventually hurt the bottom line. For now, she would like companies to find a middle ground.

”The status quo is not satisfactory,” says MacKinnon, CNN’s former Beijing bureau chief. “Freedom of expression and privacy are important and these companies need to figure out a solution.” While several companies have drafted their own principles, none have ratified MacKinnon’s package, and none are expected to before later this year. At most, these companies have joined a process, MacKinnon says. And even getting to that point was difficult. “It's been a real headache making conversation,” MacKinnon says.

“In the long term, it screws their business and in the long term it screws their relationship with their clients.” She says. “If you're (the Chinese search engine) Baidu and you want people in the European Union to trust your service, and everyone knows you censor content, how do you convince your clients you are a reliable broker of content?”

For now, the pressure is domestic rather than international because the home bases of western companies have strong human rights guarantees. Google earned worldwide criticism last year when caved in to Chinese demands for a censored search engine.

But activists like MacKinnon avoid human rights rhetoric that could be seen as a threat to recalcitrant governments. She says the focus is on commercialism instead of activism

“We should not expect companies to play a role to change a government. The issue is really the relationship between the customer, the company and the government. How can these companies stay firmly in the middle?” she asks.

Companies that don’t advertise their principles to consumers, or companies that allow public relations firms to create a gulf between perception and actual operations, ultimately run into trouble, she says. Not wishing to endanger profitable government franchises, companies may end up alienating the consumer.

That might have seemed impossible a decade ago in the hurly burly of the Internet, but a new world of Web empowerment has made used brand-conscious deconstructionists who really want transparency and responsiveness out of their favorite companies.

Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft have acknowledged privately that the lack of clear principles in these countries is a problem. Some say privately that it's a cost of doing business in a place like China. They also quietly still back the process MacKinnon is pushing, but it is a difficult for one-time cyber-revolutionaries. In early May, Google’s board of directors embarrassingly asked shareholders to vote down proposed language requiring the company to resist government censorship and notify Google users when governments require the company to censor search results.

”The presence of companies like Yahoo! in markets abroad can have a transformative effect on peoples' lives and on local and national economies,” Michael Samway, vice president and general counsel for Yahoo! wrote on a Yahoo! business blog. “Information is power. Access to information, especially through the Internet, has changed what people know about the world around them and about events, people and issues that directly impact their lives day-to-day.”

What he says is true, as far as it goes but users need to know what they are not being told, so that they can make their own choices about the types of services they use, says MacKinnon. “They do not know what is being taken out of their information environment,” she says.

When users in China, for instance, try to access a website and find it blocked, there is no message, like there is in most other countries, saying why it has been blocked and who to contact in order to seek clarification.

But that may be changing. Not more than a month after China president Hu Jintao announced that China officials should work to “purify” the Internet, four prominent lawyers lashed out at the popular portal Sina.com for censoring articles that they deemed important for public consumption. Screen shots of the bulletin boards where the messages were posted show blank areas. In the letter, the lawyers issued six points for clarification. One of them asks: “Sina.com, please tell us: Why do you even believe that wilful deletion corresponds to your commercial interests?”

Sina officials have not yet responded.

Doug Crets is a senior analyst at Media Partners Asia, an independent media consulting firm.

Comments (4)

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twowinstone:granite and marble
written by Annie , January 14, 2008

granite countertops,granite tiles,vanity tops at twowin stone corp

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Compare this with MySpace in US
written by Charles Liu , May 27, 2007

Say, didn't MySpace recently reversed its decision on not sharing user information with the US government? What happened there? No government pressure I'm sure.

So what is "Freedom"? As we see how we want to impose on people, or as they see it within their reality and current states?

Should the Saudis lament the fact Yahoo in US violates their sensitivity (as well as US laws on community standards) and archives child porn for pedophiles?

How about unveiled women, as that too cross the Saudi's notion of freedom

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...
written by Rachel Gendreau , May 25, 2007

Recalcitrant governments, blocked websites, the hurly-burly of the internet...a very interesting piece, Mr. Crets, though, I must admit, it is no 'Juliets.'

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written by H. Swindall , May 21, 2007

This is just the sort of behavior that underlay Lenin's quip that a capitalist will sell you the rope with which you hang him. Can't these companies, which never could have been launched anywhere but free countries and which should promote free information access, realize they are cutting their own throats in the long term by cooperating with totalitarians for immediate profit? Chinese are only capable of limited copies of technology they never could have invented, which they then apply to limited uses fitting their own collectivized, over-centralized character. This is obvious in everything about them, from education to diplomacy. Western companies can actually do themselves and everyone else, including the Chinese population, a power of good by standing up to absurd restrictions from Beijing.

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