Legislating Ethics

Rebecca MacKinnon has another very important post about ethical standards. Reporters without borders has asked the question, (probably due to the recent MSN censorship of the chinese blogger) as to whether or not web companies should be required to adhere to any laws regarding freedom of expression, and censorship in any country in which they do business. I think its a very difficult question, and it will be discussed around the net for a while I’m sure.

People smarter than me will have lots of interesting things to say, so I’m certainly reserving my final opinion for later, but I do think that would be a dangerous path to go down. I think it would be more useful if it was done by a trusted third-party. Companies could then be accredited by them, and in a world where information management companies will be more important I think that accreditation might actually come to mean something.

I think, if only a few companies stood up and decided to form a standard along with a watchdog type group the leverage would be there to pull in other companies to the discussion. Yes, it’s difficult and it may hurt the profitability of your company in the short run, but no one likes you hear that a company sold out a person to the chinese government. That is very bad PR. It plays badly for everyone, not just techno-libertarians online. No one wants to think about their ISP giving their government information. If there was some system instilling trust in these companies I think, in the long run, it would only help them by increasing the trust their customers have in them. I do think, however, that Rebecca MacKinnon is right in this,

If American technology companies don’t do a better job at showing they care about human rights and freedom of speech, calls for government intervention are likely to grow louder.

It would seem like the time to act is now, anyone would rather have a system in place that they themselves helped craft along with the people who really care about it, than one forced on the industry by legislators who have a very rough grasp of the internet at all.