Code of Conduct for US Internet Companies

I was interviewed yesterday by Tom Mello of the E-Commerce Times on EFF’s proposed code of conduct for US internet companies that work in regimes, like China, who heavily censor the internet.

EFF’s proposed code is “a step in the right” direction, said Matt Browner-Hamlin, operations director for New York-based Students for a Free Tibet.

The organization, which was founded in 1994, this week launched an anti-Google Web site, noluv4google.com. It has also staged demonstrations outside the company’s offices around the world protesting the search engine’s collusion with the Chinese government to censor access to certain politically charged Web sites.

It is unlikely the industry will adopt any guidelines governing dealings with authoritarian regimes like China, according to Browner-Hamlin.

“They have not shown that will,” he told the E-Commerce Times.

“Microsoft, Yahoo and Google have been operating in China for a long time. They’ve had ample opportunity to do the right thing before, and they haven’t done it,” Browner-Hamline noted.

“The fact that they haven’t done it makes me skeptical about their sincerity,” he continued. “Moves by the government may be necessary to get them to do it. The reality is, though, they don’t need the government to do this. They could do this on their own today.

SFT hasn’t been working on any proposals for how these companies should be doing business with China, so it was welcoming to see EFF submit such a clear plan to Congress. Mello clearly conveyed the point I was trying to get across – government involvement is a good solution, but not a necessary one if Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft chose to do the right thing on their own. These companies determine their own operating procedures and they can change them at the drop of a hat. If Google sincerely feels that standards can be created for more ethical conduct in business practices in China, they should have instituted them before launching a major censorship platform last month. These companies need to put up or shut up — or rather, welcome US government intervention to stop their cowardly ethical weakness in the face of Chinese yuan.