IGF Dispatch: Selling Routers to Beijing: Corporate Responsibility under Repressive Regimes

Today there was a lot of talk at the IGF about corporate responsibility and censorship in repressive regimes. It was a wonderful opportunity to bash China, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft. 

This is certainly a complex topic with arguments to be made for both engagement and refusal to deal under certain circumstances but it’s a mistake to put corporations in the position of judge and jury over their customers.

A number of participants seemed to think that IT companies were acting in collusion with repressive regimes because they were selling technology to them. Now come on people, these are not exactly thumb screws that are being sold here but routers, search engines and word processors.  Nearly every country, developed or lesser developed, in the world have a segment of the population that would like restrictions on information flow because of religious beliefs or the protection of their children.

Should corporations be creating an index of every community in the world and wag their finger at those of which they do not approve? What if the owners of the company are highly religious and you and I don’t agree with their choices? Taken to its logical extreme, this could even lead to a refusal to deal with their own governments which could bring up a whole host of problems.