Web censorship prevents Google from working
As the Associated Press reports citing a Google representative, since the beginning of this year, the advertising giant has repeatedly contacted the office of the US Trade Representative to discuss the problem of total control over the Internet in some countries by their governments. This statement could be taken as another attempt by the company to whitewash its name, stained with last year's deal with the Chinese authorities, but in fact everything is much more interesting.
The topic of the interviews of Andrew McLaughlin, head of Google’s public policy department, and Susan Schwab, who occupied the post of Sales Representative * last year, was not as such the oppression of the rights and freedoms of Chinese citizens, Arab and many other countries, but the harmful influence which it has to employ American businesses in these states.
A key component of a successful business for Google and similar companies is maximum freedom of information circulation. Representatives of human rights organizations have repeatedly noted this, observing in perplexity how a business is putting a spell on its wheels, making agreements with the authoritarian authorities of China, which has the second largest language segment of the Network. And now the time has apparently come when, in the wake of the democratization of everything and everyone, we can hope to eliminate these temporary obstacles that have already served their time, allowing them to enter promising markets.
The original, simple and promising idea of ​​viewing information on the Internet as a product or service and regulating its movement across state borders according to the same rules came a couple of years ago to a professor at Columbia University Timothy Wu. A fairly well-known expert in intellectual property issues and the author of many academic and popular works (see, for example, his book Who Controls the Internet ?: The Illusions of a World Without Borders ) and a personal blog ), Wu thought that if a country has state monopoly on the truth, then in our information age it can be viewed from the same angle as the monopoly on potatoes or gasoline.
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And this assumption directly implies that restricting the work of the Internet, interfering with the work of Internet companies, should be viewed as unfair competition from the state, because, as a rule, it always offers its own, carefully trained, loyal staff, instead of blocked sites. Influencing malicious protectionists in this case can and should be done through the mechanism of the World Trade Organization. Or, if the offending country is not part of the WTO, apply economic sanctions to it.
However, Wu himself notes that things are not so simple. You can try to apply his calculations if the government closes its citizens with access to the entire service, for example, YouTube or Internet telephony. However, partial content filtering may be justified by the authorities as a legitimate struggle for moral integrity and security of the country, the right to which is spelled out in the WTO charter.
Moreover, sanctions to China or Saudi Arabia are a step that few people want to take in the modern Western world, and even more so in the United States. With the first America, economic cooperation is increasing at an enormous pace every year, and the Arab sheikhs today, according to various estimates, in one way or another control from 2 to 7 percent of the total turnover of exchange trading on Wall Street. It is absolutely clear that even the most democratic and freedom-loving (say, without quotes) the state will think many times before quarreling with such advantageous partners.
From this, I would conclude that a favorable for Google outcome of consultations with the Trade Mission will depend largely on what steps the company will take to meet the US government. How this story will affect the motto “Don't Be Evil” we still have to learn. But the possibility is very great that having gained more freedom abroad, Google will not provoke a shrinkage of freedoms in its own country.
* The Trade Representative in the USA is appointed by the President and on behalf of the entire Cabinet is responsible for the country's international trade policy, directly coordinating the most important areas of economic cooperation.
The topic of the interviews of Andrew McLaughlin, head of Google’s public policy department, and Susan Schwab, who occupied the post of Sales Representative * last year, was not as such the oppression of the rights and freedoms of Chinese citizens, Arab and many other countries, but the harmful influence which it has to employ American businesses in these states.
A key component of a successful business for Google and similar companies is maximum freedom of information circulation. Representatives of human rights organizations have repeatedly noted this, observing in perplexity how a business is putting a spell on its wheels, making agreements with the authoritarian authorities of China, which has the second largest language segment of the Network. And now the time has apparently come when, in the wake of the democratization of everything and everyone, we can hope to eliminate these temporary obstacles that have already served their time, allowing them to enter promising markets.
The original, simple and promising idea of ​​viewing information on the Internet as a product or service and regulating its movement across state borders according to the same rules came a couple of years ago to a professor at Columbia University Timothy Wu. A fairly well-known expert in intellectual property issues and the author of many academic and popular works (see, for example, his book Who Controls the Internet ?: The Illusions of a World Without Borders ) and a personal blog ), Wu thought that if a country has state monopoly on the truth, then in our information age it can be viewed from the same angle as the monopoly on potatoes or gasoline.
')
And this assumption directly implies that restricting the work of the Internet, interfering with the work of Internet companies, should be viewed as unfair competition from the state, because, as a rule, it always offers its own, carefully trained, loyal staff, instead of blocked sites. Influencing malicious protectionists in this case can and should be done through the mechanism of the World Trade Organization. Or, if the offending country is not part of the WTO, apply economic sanctions to it.
However, Wu himself notes that things are not so simple. You can try to apply his calculations if the government closes its citizens with access to the entire service, for example, YouTube or Internet telephony. However, partial content filtering may be justified by the authorities as a legitimate struggle for moral integrity and security of the country, the right to which is spelled out in the WTO charter.
Moreover, sanctions to China or Saudi Arabia are a step that few people want to take in the modern Western world, and even more so in the United States. With the first America, economic cooperation is increasing at an enormous pace every year, and the Arab sheikhs today, according to various estimates, in one way or another control from 2 to 7 percent of the total turnover of exchange trading on Wall Street. It is absolutely clear that even the most democratic and freedom-loving (say, without quotes) the state will think many times before quarreling with such advantageous partners.
From this, I would conclude that a favorable for Google outcome of consultations with the Trade Mission will depend largely on what steps the company will take to meet the US government. How this story will affect the motto “Don't Be Evil” we still have to learn. But the possibility is very great that having gained more freedom abroad, Google will not provoke a shrinkage of freedoms in its own country.
* The Trade Representative in the USA is appointed by the President and on behalf of the entire Cabinet is responsible for the country's international trade policy, directly coordinating the most important areas of economic cooperation.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/11325/
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