Dealing with China Requires Web Industry Unity
High-tech firms must devise common principles to tackle the Internet regimes of repressive nations such as in China, agreed Google and Microsoft executives Fri. at a Washington event. The need for industry collaboration, coupled with U.S. govt. pressure, surfaced at a House human rights subcommittee hearing on American firms’ dealings in China this year. Lawmakers have knocked Internet firms for caving in to Beijing demands for Web blocking, filtering and user monitoring (WID Feb 2 p1).
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Google Senior Policy Counsel Andrew McLaughlin offered a “short list” of principles that firms should follow, at the annual Conference on Computers, Freedom & Privacy. Search engines should tell users in Web-restricting countries what results or pages have been removed, he said. They also should operate in a way that’s “transparent to the world” by saying which nations ask them to curb access and how they responded. Firms also must show commitment to protecting personal and confidential information and tell users how their data might be at risk.
Most importantly, McLaughlin said, he and his colleagues must gain enough power from the market to push for a more formal, legal framework for govts. to follow when requesting that data be restricted online. Firms can band together to “insist on pieces of paper changing hands and government officials being accountable for what they're ordering you to do,” he said: “It’s critical that whole bunch of companies get on board with this.” McLaughlin’s principles may lack pragmatism, Human Rights in China Exec. Dir. Sharon Hom said. Google wrongly assumes the Communist country’s legal regime can accommodate the proposed path forward and that judges and govt. officials involved in the process won’t be corrupt, Hom said.
Industry principles must go beyond oft-cited firms like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo, and seek not merely to achieve critical mass or the greatest political impact, Microsoft’s Fred Tipson said. It’s crucial because on the global stage, issues of access and repression involve “a whole range of companies and they need to be actively conversing,” he said. “We either convince the Chinese to behave differently as an authority or we don’t succeed,” Tipson said. Pressure from business will be more useful in dealing with China than bilateral beatings by the U.S. govt., he said.
Apart from the congressional hearing, there hasn’t been a “good conversation” among industry players on the Internet in repressive countries, said Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) Exec. Dir. Leslie Harris. The situation poses great risk, not just to people who face serious human rights abuse online and off, she said. The threat to the global Internet is real because China is starting to build a “balkanized” Internet at odds with the Web’s user-controlled, user-driven, deregulatory approach. There’s been “more heat than light on the questions of how the U.S. Internet companies should or should not operate in those countries,” Harris said.
But slapping new external “values” atop existing business models won’t work, said U. of San Diego philosophy prof. Larry Hinman. A more fruitful tack is for firms to pick principles they need to commit to internally for their own benefit, he said. Human Rights First Senior Counsel Eric Biel said it boils down to differentiating between companies’ affirmative responsibilities and basic do-no-harm principles when it comes to not contributing directly or implicitly to repression of information. One thing is sure, Harris said: It’s going to be a “long, hard slog,” regardless of how industry decides to respond.