Internet and Democracy: The Sequel

A decade ago, the Internet was widely seen as a means to diminish the power of countries to regulate the flow of ideas and information. However, we have witnessed the resurgence of national sovereignty in cyberspace, with many countries now resorting to a combination of technology, law and intimidation to reign in the spread of free speech via the Net. Often aided by the technological support of the private sector in the United States, for this class, we will debate the ethics, practicality and implications of Internet censorship.

Readings

• Read John Palfrey and Jonathan Zittrain: Reluctant Gatekeepers: Corporate Ethics on a Filtered Internet
• Take a look at the ONI blog
• And the ONI global filtering map
• Explore the Global Network Initiative website GNI, with particular attention to the Principles, Implementation Guidelines, and Governance Framework

Class Introduction

Reluctant Gatekeepers: Corporate Ethics on a Filtered Internet

Jonathan Zittrain and John Palfrey

Taking on applied ethics close to information and business ethics, Jonathan Zittrain and John Palfrey bring up that that successful technology companies should focus on implementing great ideas that people will pay for. Seems obvious yet this easy realization comes with a subsequent hindrance. That to carry out these practices, governed-states will turn to other private firms to provide tools and services necessary to effect the censorship and surveillance of the content appropriate to their standards. Almost any business in the information technologies or telecommunications space will find themselves in this position. These private firms hired from the governed-states benefit greatly from these modifications. They profit from the rendering of established technologies, which allow them to grow alongside these technological advances. It is not an uncommon practice, these private firms include hardware manufacturers, software firms, online service providers, and local access providers, among others who rely on these appropriated modification of already distributed technologies.

Jonathan Zittrain and John Palfrey argue as a result, that the corporations, as an unifying industry, are best placed to work together to resolve this additional rendering of their technologies by adopting a code of conduct to govern their activities in these increasingly common situations. These corporations in their practices will unify competitors, yet allow competitors to create without modifying private firms in a separate, yet similar industry to profit off them. In addition, they argue that in forming this code of conduct, corporations should consult with NGO's, academics, public officials, and other more relevant practitioners to ascertain their prospective success in avoiding further conflict with these governing states and private firms. Yet corporations know that they have an obligation to obey local laws with respect to services they offer in all jurisdictions to their citizens. Corporations often perceive that they do not have the option of resisting the demands of law enforcement officials, for fear that the corporation or their local employees will face legal penalties or that their licenses to operate will be revoked. Some corporations, recognizing the risks in doing business in certain locales have limited the types of services that they offer in those contexts to avoid being placed in an uncomfortable position. ( such as Google.cn ;) )

For corporations know well enough that complying with ethics would avoid unfavorable outcomes in the way they are perceived. Thus, by forming this code of conduct, corporations will operate with more ease in terms of compliance amongst each other. However, some corporations conclude that there is no ethical problem here or, at least, that the stated ethical problem is nothing new. If an Internet censorship and surveillance group is entirely legitimate from the perspective of international legal policies and societal norms in a governed state, then for an outside provider to do business with them, they are required to participate under those conditions.

Regardless, an industry-led approach to this supposed ethical problem could have, at the very least, the benefit of improved clarity to its users. Allowing for a more democratic selective process, their users can appropriate themselves with these corporations only empowering the user to be a self-governing user of these technologies. If the code is well-drafted and well-implemented, users of Internet-based services would know what to expect in terms of what their service provider would do when faced with a particular censorship or surveillance demand. The benefit of such an approach could well extend to further self-incorporating developments amongst the companies and the users. Jonathan Zittrain and John Palfrey close that the ICT industry as a whole should strive to provide the best possible services without compromising civil liberties of its users, the generativity of the network which shelters these users, and by doing so, operate in a democratic approach that protects its users without sacrificing the development of its technology. --Kida89 20:36, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

As has been clear from the beginning of this class, of the many constituencies who are active in the emergent culture of the internet, multinational web-based corporations stand out as being torn between many often antagonistic masters whose goals can be mutually exclusive and whose cultural and legal points of reference may have little or no commonality. For example, Google, in its entrance to china, was torn between the requirements of the Chinese government, the demand for information by the Chinese users, the demand of share holders to be profitable and the expectation of American consumers that the company live up to its motto "Don't Be Evil" (a stance clearly informed by American culture and perception of the Chinese government). What is made clear in the Zittrain / Palfrey reading is that along with varying legal jurisdictions, cultural expectations and norms, the ethical dilemmas posed by the demands placed on range from nonexistent to profound depending on the level at which a given company is complicit in the restriction of access to information and the nature of the restricted information. Their solution (reflected by the GNI) of major players defining their own guidelines and terms and working with regimes to codify their self-regulation so as to have a more predictable and consistent behavior across companies raises a number of interesting questions. One which I will raise is, what will the effect of the establishment of multinational internet-based corporations as a united (or at least organized) constituency (constituencies?) which can function as an intermediary between disparate governments and people have on the understanding of the nature of corporations? What effect does their political status in the US as defined by the supreme court have? What effect on democracy (suppressed, burgeoning or established) will the leverage of the market have when lent either to the people’s desire for information or the governments desire for restriction? --Kbrady 21:04, 27 April 2010 (UTC)