Commentary

Search Big Three To Create Business Codes For Working In Repressive Countries

The upcoming Olympics in China have revived concerns about how Web companies do business abroad, including the extent to which they censor material and whether they can be trusted to protect users' privacy.

The latest development: Google, Microsft and Yahoo said they're finalizing a voluntary code of principles for doing business in repressive countries.

"Since the beginning of the process, our objective has been to reach agreement among a significant number of companies, investors, and other non-governmental organizations on a set of clear and rigorous principles, such that restrictive governments would be unable to ignore or reject these best practices on freedom of expression and the protection of individual privacy," Google deputy general counsel Nicole Wong wrote in a letter to Senators Richard Durbin and Tom Coburn. Microsoft and Yahoo sent similar letters to the lawmakers.

Google also assured the senators that it won't reveal any information about U.S. journalists, athletes or tourists who use the Web while in China.

The companies have previously been criticized for their practices in China. Yahoo, in particular, got a black eye when it disclosed the identities of Chinese dissidents, paving the way for their arrest and incarceration. Google, meanwhile, has been taken to task for censoring search results.

Of those two practices, it's probably a lot easier for Congress to pressure the companies to protect users' privacy than to stop censoring results. In fact, a pending bill, the Global Online Freedom Act, would generally prohibit U.S. companies from revealing users' identities, other than for legitimate law enforcement purposes.

But legislating how companies return search results won't be nearly as simple. For one thing, the companies can legitimately argue that if they didn't censor results, they wouldn't be allowed to operate at all abroad.

What's more, while censoring search results seems antithetical to Google's mission, it's hard to see how laws aimed at stopping that would be constitutional. After all, the same First Amendment that gives Google the right to publish whatever search results it wishes in the U.S. also appears to give the company the right to not publish certain results. Whether that's a wise move -- or in keeping with the company's don't-be-evil mantra -- is another question entirely.

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