Debate 3-Argument for the Resolution

The Question

"Resolved: United States technology companies should stay out of regimes that force them to sacrifice the civil liberties of citizens as the cost of doing business in those states."

• Participation in filtering of political speech is wrong.
• Collaborating with oppressive regimes reinforces the status quo.
  • Citizens within a regime are more likely to call for change if the U.S. companies are totally absent rather than giving the impression they are available.
  • If Google is working in concert with an oppressive regime Google engineers are not attempting to circumvent oppressive controls.
    • "Google can build the technology the Chinese need to make China’s regulation more perfectly enabled, and China can extract that talent from Google by mandating it as a condition of being in China’s market." Lawrence Lessig, Code 2.0, pp. 80.
    • Participation in content filtering not only supports the practice directly by making it possible, it neutralizes the ability of U.S. companies to be a real force for change in oppressive regimes.
• Turning information over to oppressive regimes contradicts basic values that companies espouse (or should espouse).
  • Google refused to turn over 1,000,000 million random searches from a specified time period to the U.S. government to aid the government with an effort to discover trends in searches for pornography in order to better regulate pornography. (January 2006, Lawrence Lessig, Code 2.0, pp. 204). This seems to reflect some level of discomfort with what the government was doing. Whether it was because Google felt that the privacy of users may be compromised or whether it was because Google felt this was and indirect violation of the First Amendment is not important, what is important is that they were willing to stand for a certain principle in defiance of the U.S. government based on principle. The request itself was likely legal as both Microsoft and Yahoo! complied to similar requests from the government. The obvious difference here and with requests from repressive regimes is that the request from the U.S. government was not backed by threat of legal sanction, it was a request for voluntary help. However, it seems to be a somewhat inconsistent position to argue that a company will not comply with such requests based on some principle while complying with requests that would violate the U.S. Constitution if made by the U.S. government.
• U.S. technology companies are at the forefront of web development and will play a significant role in shaping the future structure of the Net. (The "Code" to use Lessig's terminology.) This carries a heavy burden to make good faith efforts to see that the resulting architecture is in harmony with basic concepts of human rights.