Internet giants sign Human Rights guidelines

GUIDELINES WILL be announced today to help big Internet firms do the right thing when it comes to Human Rights, instead of just handing out people’s data to authorities, willy nilly, especially in restrictive regimes like the USA.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are all signed up to the new Global Network Initiative guidelines, banged together by the Internet giants themselves as well as several human rights organisations.

The guidelines will attempt to deal with the all too frequent thorny issues of Internet censorship and freedom of speech, issues which have gotten both Google and Yahoo into quite a bit of trouble already over the years.

Yahoo and Taiwanese-born CEO, Jerry Yang, have taken serious heat for pandering to the Chinese government in the past, namely for handing over e-mails leading to the imprisonment of two Chinese journalists back in 2002. Yang was called a moral "pygmy" by a Republican congressman for that.

Google’s reputation isn’t exactly whiter than white either when it comes to dealing with business behind the bamboo curtain. The firm won’t offer e-mail or blogging services in the Middle Kingdom because it claims it doesn't want to be put in a sticky situation IF the Chinese government decided to ask for any user's communications. *cough, Spineless, cough*.

As if that wasn’t enough, Google is also known to censor its Chinese search results to comply with government regulations. Google maintains it self censors because at least some search results are better than no search results, but it’s more likely the Google monster has its wonga goggles on and is just reluctant to give up on such a huge market.

Leslie Harris, CEO for one of the main groups behind the guidelines, the Center for Democracy and Technology, reckons the guidelines are useful because they force firms to think about Human rights issues before they crop up and before they decide where to set up shop.

But, at the same time, the guidelines, which took 18 months to come up with, don’t ban companies from collaborating with authoritarian or totalitarian regimes and leave key points open to interpretation, something not everyone is happy about.

"What's disappointing is that the amount of effort ... didn't produce something more substantial," Morton Sklar, executive director of the World Organization for Human Rights USA, told AP. It’s not even made clear if companies violating human rights on issues of free speech would be sanctioned for it, or by what means.

Meanwhile, however, the signatory companies are waxing lyrical about the inititive with Google gushing it has always "promoted free expression and the protection of our users' privacy," and yahoo’s Yang stating the guidelines " provide a valuable roadmap for companies like Yahoo operating in markets where freedom of expression and privacy are unfairly restricted." µ

L’Inq
AP

See Also
Yahoo suffers pangs of guilt, opens wallet
Google to fight human rights proposalsGoogle buckles under power of DMCA