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Internet Freedom: Google, Microsoft, Yahoo Near Agreement
8/7/2008
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Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are "close to agreement" on a code of conduct for Internet technology companies that are doing business in countries restricting citizen dissent and speech rights, according to an announcement issued Monday by United States Sen. Dick Durbin, D-IL.
Durbin, who chairs the Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law, part of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, held hearings on the matter May 20. The event drew executive testimonies from the three companies, along with Cisco Systems.
A catalyzing event that may have led to the hearings was the case of Hu Jia, a Chinese blogger sentenced to more than three years in prison in China for criticizing its human rights record. Information supplied by Yahoo led to Hu Jia's imprisonment. Durbin, in his opening remarks at the hearing, said that four people have been jailed in China based on information supplied by Yahoo.
In response to requests from Durbin and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, the companies and nongovernmental organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, among others, are currently considering a voluntary code of conduct and have been for about 20 months. No date for an agreement has yet been specified, but a spokesperson for Senator Durbin's office, Max Fleishman, suggested that it might happen in the fall.
"They've agreed in principle to a set code of conduct," Fleishman said. "This is the three Internet groups we named directly--Google, Yahoo and Microsoft--in addition to a large number of other stakeholders, human rights groups, NGOs, other technology firms. They've all agreed in principle to this code. We don't anticipate the final agreement and the final language of this code to be finished for another few weeks--perhaps I would estimate it sometime in September."
That date seems to match a statement from Pamela S. Passman, Microsoft's corporate vice president for Global Corporate Affairs, who described Microsoft's work on a so-called "Information, Communications and Technology Initiative."
"Over the next few months, the Initiative will be finalizing organizational steps.... We anticipate a more detailed public announcement to launch the Initiative sometime this fall," Passman wrote in a letter dated July 29, 2008 to Sens. Durbin and Coburn.
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