Debate 3-Argument for the Resolution

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Debate 3-Argument Against 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."

General Ideas

  • 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.
    • The Chinese government relies on self censorship to further their goals. Self censorship is more effective than centralized censorship; they need cooperation from U.S. companies to keep doing what they are doing.
  • Turning information over to oppressive regimes contradicts basic values that companies espouse (or should espouse).
    • Google refused to turn over 1,000,000 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.
  • There are already limits on freedom to contract to the extent that we do not allow contracts that violate the constitution. For example, contracts for indentured servitude in violation of the 13th Amendment cannot be made. That is, they will not be enforced by U.S. courts. While contract to do business overseas would be under the jurisdiction of other governments, it is somewhat analogous to suggest that U.S. companies should not be able to enter into these types of contracts to do business (if the contract violates the U.S. constitution).
  • There us likely a trickle down effect to other countries influenced by regionally dominant regimes that filter. (Palfrey and Zittrain) Additionally, China likely has the greatest influence on North Korea: opening the Net in China could indirectly lead to reform in North Korea. (The same could be said of loosening restrictions in some countries in the Middle East.)

Case Study: China

  • The Net is not the same Net if you are in China.
  • China employs a variety of tools to further its goals of censorship.
    • Selective filtering--connections from universities are more heavily filtered. Impressionable university students are thus one of the most highly restricted classes of people when it comes to access to foreign sites.
    • The government agency in charge of censorship recognizes companies that excel in self censorship; trying to create a culture that reinforces their goals.
    • Random filtering. Sometimes it is difficult to know what is filtered and why--this pushes users to local options such as Baidu where the results are more consistent.
    • The Chinese government intentionally slows down access to U.S. search engines on occasion in order to push users to Baidu.
    • The blocking of Google.com in 2002 for two weeks was likely prompted by action from Baidu. See Google's China Problem (and China's Google Problem), pp. 3
  • The Chinese are using the structure of the internet (the "code" to use Lessig's terminology) to reinforce and the political culture they have created. It is inaccurate to say that they (or any other repressive regime) are just giving the people what they want. The very architecture of what is accessible becomes part of what dictates what people "want."

Why U.S. Technology Companies Should Just "Stay Out"

  • The choice by U.S. technology firms to enter into these markets necessarily represents a political statement.
  • No acceptable means of regulating business in oppressive regimes is currently available.
    • Industry self-regulation has a great deal of conceptual defects.
      • Incentives: Unless social awareness of these problems is dramatically raised and consumers have the opportunity to make choices through which substantial market pressure is applied to these companies, they have little incentive to self-regulate. Moreover, the lack of transparency as to the details of their foreign dealings makes it unlikely that any such companies will develop a negative domestic reputation, let alone have that reputation translated into monetary incentives.
      • Enforcement and Monitoring: The possibility of a common industry code has been proposed, but without any legal or market pressures to publicly adhere to the code, individual companies competition with one another lack the incentive to join it. Even those who do claim to adhere will have incentives not do so completely or rigorously, and monitoring compliance would be costly. Also, the very conception of such an industry code is itself problematic, as any set of proscriptions detailed enough to achieve the desired effect would be eschewed by the industry.
    • Legal regulation in the form of second-order statutory enactments is problematic as well.
      • Example: wide criticism and failure to pass the Global Online Freedom Act (http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=109_cong_bills&docid=f:h4780ih.txt.pdf).
      • Second-order regulation may actually result in a worsening of the oppressive policies of foreign regimes. Proposed regulations have been framed in terms of limiting corporate cooperation with foreign censorship and surveillance to explicit requests made by official authority. Such policies do nothing about civil liberties violations that are backed by official authority and actually would put pressure on softer, more informal regimes to institute more substantial official and procedural methods of oppression.
      • No matter how you slice it, it’s hard to define statutorily what kind of activities should be prohibited. Internet regulation is complex; according to Lessig, it takes place through law, code, markets, and norms, and it’s often difficult to understand exactly how the products provided by various types of technology intersect with those modes of regulation in foreign markets.
        • Censorship and Surveillance each can be used in both oppressive and beneficial ways, so attempting to legislate based on these broad types of internet regulation is futile.
        • The “Oppenheimer” problem of dual technology makes it difficult to tailor legislation to the type of technology in question or the use to which it is to be put.
        • The type of regulation practiced by foreign regimes is often difficult to ascertain, so legislation based on the type of involvement undertaken by a technology company is also infeasible.
        • Because the nature of the products and services provided by this industry changes so rapidly, virtually any legislative categorization is likely to rapidly become obsolete.
  • The modified technology products that U.S. companies offer in order to comply with the requirements of foreign oppressive regimes cause more harm than good in these emerging markets.
    • The sudden entry of U.S. technology firms in developing foreign markets curtails the opportunity for these markets to develop their own technologies. Staying out would spur technological innovation as well as economic development in these countries, and it would also allow at least some segments of the market or population to develop a first-hand appreciation for the democratizing potential of the internet.
    • The provision of modified services is not necessarily better than the provision of no services at all. While staying out of these markets preserves their potential for internal development and innovation, products such as google.cn simultaneously promulgate a distorted impression of the cyberworld and eliminate the apparent need to explore such technologies.
  • The economic gains of entering into business in oppressive regimes are not worth the cost of the civil liberty sacrifices they require. Even one incident like the Chinese journalist jailed after Yahoo! complied with government surveilance requests is one incident too many.

Methods of Enforcement

  • Ideally, U.S. companies would voluntarily agree to stay out of oppressive regimes. This would be facilitated if government and NGO actors promote dialogue between U.S. companies that could then use their collective weight to influence authoritarian regimes.
    • Government and non profit groups can act as intermediaries to facilitate communication and cooperation amongst US companies.
    • Industry regulation can respond more quickly than government solutions. (Palfrey and Zittrain)
  • Likely the solution will be a combination of government and private efforts.
    • Codify industry standards (Palfrey and Zittrain)
    • Government can also bring other pressures (trade and diplomacy) to aid in the effort.

Some Response

  • The argument that US can't complain other nations since its own civil liberty history is disgraceful doesn't make any sense.
    • “civil liberties” have become (if not have been) a generally accepted concpetion and was widely defined in constitutions of most countries (even in China) as well as in international conventions. The real questions is not whether or not to honor them or how to interpret them, instead, is how to ensure the promise was kepted.
    • The States may be not on the moral high ground on several issues as it contested, but it is on this one. Even countries practicing filtering and surveillance are either trying to legitimating their acts by fooling around with the definitions or by claiming a greater value. But the value of "civil liberties" itself is almost unchallengable.
    • The restatement of American history by our counterpart at least loosely touched the point that our history is evolutive. It will then be ridiculous to justify any illegitimagte modern conducts from a historical value.
  • Illusions of "Business is business" and free market
    • The idea that we leave technology companies doing there own business is just too simple to be true. If technology companies can assist Chinese government supressing free speech, why are we still prohibiting ammunition trade with China?
    • It has been widely accpeted that corporate social responsibility is a correction of profit-maximazing business model.

Outside Resources

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