Mosaiko

Industry Takes a Stand for Online Freedom

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In response to government crackdowns on citizens’ Internet freedom, a diverse group of institutions including human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), investors, journalism schools and a handful of major technology corporations in 2008 founded the Global Network Initiative (GNI). Drawing on internationally recognized human rights laws and standards, GNI provides guidance on how companies can respond when faced with government pressure to infringe on Internet freedom. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, are among the participants.

While many industry leaders have not joined GNI, the group’s influence continues to grow, according to some observers. “While only three companies have joined, GNI has laid out set of standards for privacy in industry that lots of companies are referring to so they’re becoming the de facto standard,” says Rebecca MacKinnon, GNI board member and visiting fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. Those companies do human rights assessments before entering markets and establish procedures to assure their practices adhere to the GNI principles. Yahoo, for example, elected to operate its Vietnamese service out of Singapore, to prevent Vietnamese police access to account holder information, MacKinnon said.

A test case for the GNI principles came with Google’s 2010 decision to cease complying with Chinese censorship standards, and its threat to withdraw from the Chinese market after “a highly sophisticated and targeted attack” from within China. The company’s investigation of the attacks found that they targeted accounts held by human rights activists. Human Rights Watch (HRW), another GNI partner, saluted Google’s response, and urged others to follow. “We are pressing more companies to adopt GNI standards, while also calling for federal laws to make it illegal for [U.S.-based] Internet companies to take part in censorship or to share private user information,” HRW said in an online article. “With these steps, we will create a stronger foundation for internet freedom around the world.”