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Article

14 Aug 2007

Author:
John Palfrey, executive director of Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Univ., & Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet governance & regulation, Oxford Univ., on CNet News.com

Companies need guidance to face censors abroad

If you are in the business of Internet or telecommunications services [and expanding into China, Vietnam, Thailand or Singapore], you are going to be asked to censor the information you provide to people. And you'll probably be asked to turn over information about your users to the local police, rarely with anything approaching what we'd call "due process" in the United States... The most efficient and thorough way to address this conundrum is for corporations themselves to take the lead...with a common, voluntary code of conduct... Google, Microsoft, Vodafone, Yahoo and TeliaSonera are actively working together on a code... Just as noteworthy are those who are not yet involved in this process, especially those firms that sell relevant services and products directly to governments, such as Cisco, WebSense and Secure Computing.