Google: Net Censorship is a Trade Barrier
Jun 22, 2007
Google has been making policy-related headlines on everything from privacy and copyright to antitrust issues and even green tech. This time, Google is in the news because of its efforts to curb online censorship around the world.
While the company, along with Microsoft and Yahoo, has itself previously been criticized for enabling online censorship in China, the Associated Press reports that Google's policy team is "taking a novel approach to the problem by asking U.S. trade officials to treat Internet restrictions as international trade barriers, similar to other hurdles to global commerce, such as tariffs."
Googler Andrew McLaughlin, director of public policy and government affairs, is quoted in the article as saying, "censorship is the No. 1 barrier to trade that we face" and the hope is that trade policies can be leveraged to fight Internet filtering in other countries.
A university partnership called the OpenNet Initiative that has been researching Internet filtering and surveillance in various countries found that 25 out of 41 countries have engaged in some type of online censorship.
UPDATE: Andrew McLaughlin has added this post on Google's policy blog that expands on the article, and explains more about Google's efforts in this area.
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