GNI

Draft of GNI brief

Issue areas

• Freedom of expression
• Privacy

Reading List

• Background on the GNI and its basic problems: Maclay Chapter on GNI
• EFF's critiques of GNI in their signon letter

• Introductory case study: Jailing of journalist in China
  • Congressional statement about Yahoo!'s provision of false information to Congress
    • At this time, Yahoo! was asked to endorse the Global Online Freedom Act (GOFA)
      • Text of the GOFA
      • John Palfrey/The Berkman Center have concluded that GOFA is too blunt
      • The Center for Democracy & Technology supports the goals of GOFA, but disagrees with some of the implementation
      • John Ruggie offers suggestions for how transnational businesses can foster human rights
  • Another pre-GNI online privacy controversy
• Pre-GNI Amnestry International Briefing on Freedom of Expression on the Internet [1]
  • discusses previous attempts at developing frameworks for internet governance, including:
    • United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (met in 2003, 2005) [2]
    • Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN, formerly responsible for much internet rule-setting, described as a default regulator, in absence of other agreements) [3]
    • Internet Governance Forum (started meeting annually in 2006) [4]
  • issue: Did these initiatives make any impact? If not, was it from a lack of industry involvement? What makes the GNI different?
• Update on GNI's impact

Potential difficult issues

• Protections for whistleblowers:
  • What are the applicable laws?
  • at companies implementing the GNI guidelines?
  • at other companies/organizations?
  • can technology help with anonymous/safer whistleblowing?
• Actual ability for organizations adopting the GNI to actually affect governmental regulation as required by the guidelines?
  • Are governmental regulations even the important things for adopting companies to worry about?
  • How can companies tell if/which expression/privacy regulations apply to the internet, when many are possible out of date?
  • Government regulation in general lags behind the pace of technological change
• Lack of participation by companies in certain industries (ie. telecommunication companies)
• Useful metrics for measuring compliance with GNI or similar initiatives
• Procedural issues with institution building
  • Disputes over board members and term limits
• Third-party liability in countries like China
  • Google is held liable for content posted by its users in many countries that restrict freedom of expression on the internet
    • this forces Google, for example, to compromise its users freedoms
• Getting non-United States companies/groups to join