Reporters Without Borders, an ideal organization defending the freedom of press around the world, has issued six proposals aimed at ensuring that Internet-sector companies respect freedom of expression when operating in repressive countries.

The organization calls on bloggers and Internet users to sign an online petition in support of this initiative. And this certainly concerns us, because the Internet companies involved in aiding repression include Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft.

The recommendations concern all democratic countries, but are addressed to the US government and US legislators because US Internet companies have an enormous reach and the potential to do a lot of damage. Here are some examples from Reporters Without Border’s press release.

• Since 2002, Yahoo! has agreed to censor the results of the Chinese version of its search engine in accordance with a blacklist provide by the Chinese government. Reporters Without Borders also recently proved that Yahoo! helped the Chinese police identify and then convict a journalist who was criticizing human rights abuses in China.
• Microsoft censors the Chinese version of its MSN Spaces blog tool. You cannot enter search strings such as “democracy” or “human rights in China” or “capitalism” as they are automatically rejected by the system. Microsoft also closed down a Chinese journalist’s blog following pressure from the government in Beijing. This blog was hosted on servers located in the United States.
• Google has withdrawn all sources of news and information that are censored in China from the Chinese version of its news search engine, Google News.

These practices violate the right to freedom of expression as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Reporters Without Borders work to restore this right to citizens of repressive countries. These are some of their proposals:

E-mail services: No US company would be allowed to host e-mail servers within a repressive country*. So, if the authorities of a repressive country want personal information about the user of a US company’s e-mail service, they would have to request it under a procedure supervised by US judicial authorities.

Search engines: Search engines would not be allowed to incorporate automatic filters that censor “protected” words. The list of “protected” keywords such as “democracy” or “human rights” should be appended to the law or code of conduct.

Content hosts (websites, blogs, discussion forums etc): US companies would not be allowed to locate their host servers within repressive countries. If the authorities of a repressive country desire the closure of a publication hosted by a US company, they would have to request it under a procedure supervised by the US judicial authorities. Like search engines, content hosts would not be allowed to incorporate automatic filters that censor “protected” key-words.

To support this initiative, sign the petition.

You may also want to read Reporters Without Borders press release or this background article.