Reporters Without Borders has published a set of proposals for corporate responsibility when it comes to online freedom of speech.
These six recommendations would
- forbid US email hosts from planting their servers within the borders of nations with oppressive laws aimed at quashing dissent i.e. Yahoo
- mandate a “protected” list of words that search engines would not be allowed to censor, such as “freedom” and “democracy” i.e. Yahoo
- forbid website and weblog hosts from planting servers in the same oppressive nations and protect the same set of keywords i.e. MSN Spaces
- forbid US tech companies from selling “Internet censorship software” (a little overbroad, in my opinion) or mandate a protected list of uncensorable terms i.e. Cisco
- forbid US tech companies from selling Internet surveillance and monitoring technology to oppressive regimes without the express consent of the Commerce Dept. i.e. Cisco
- forbid the same sorts of companies to train the same sorts of regimes in how to use their hardware and software for the same sort of monitoring i.e. Cisco
Sounds good to me. Where do I sign up? Oh, there’s a petition right here. Sign it.
[tags]Chinese Democracy, RSF, NoMSN, Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco, censorship, freedom of speech[/tags]