Will Western Tech Firms Stand for Freedom? Experts Are Split

Internet experts are about evenly split on whether Western-based technology firms will protect dissidents in autocratic nations a decade down the road or whether they’ll be aiding the oppressors, according to a report released Thursday.

By 2020, Western technology companies “will be expected to abide by a set of norms -- for instance, the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ citizens being attacked or challenged by their governments,” about 50 percent of 1,021 Internet stakeholders surveyed by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center said.

“In this world, for instance, a Western telecommunications firm would not be able to selectively monitor or block the Internet activity of protestors at the behest of an authoritarian government without significant penalties in other markets,” according to the survey.

About 40 percent of survey respondents reached the opposite conclusion.

By 2020, they said, Western technology firms “will have taken steps to minimize their usefulness as tools for political organizing by dissidents. They will reason that too much association with sensitive activities will put them in disfavor with autocratic governments. Indeed, in this world, commercial firms derive significant income from filtering and editing their services on behalf of the world's authoritarian regimes.”

Also on Thursday, the United Nations Human Rights Council endorsed a resolution supporting freedom of expression and information online. In a New York Times op ed following the vote Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt noted the Internet’s power to keep the world informed about repressive regimes’ actions and urged UN members to oppose Internet censorship.

From Bildt:

In past decades, massive crimes could be committed in Syria and other countries without us even knowing. But we can now follow what is happening minute by minute, megabyte by megabyte.

Today, with nearly the entire globe covered by mobile networks, the problem of physical access to the Internet is almost a forgotten issue. What is increasingly worrying is what kind of access people are being offered.

We cannot accept that the Internet’s content should be limited or manipulated depending on the flavor-of-the-month of political leaders. Only by securing access to the open and global Internet will true development take place.