Internet companies & social responsibility

This evening I am representing Global Voices in a Reuters-hosted event on corporate social responsibility. I write a lot about the need for Internet and telecoms companies to think more about social responsibility than they currently do. Over the summer I helped put together this Human Rights Watch report about multinational corporate complicity in Chinese Internet censorship.

Doing well and doing right is always tricky in any sector. Getting companies to adhere to responsible labor and environmental standards around the world has been an ongoing process for the last hundred years, and while much progress has been made, there is still long way to go.

Internet companies are all very new. Until a year or so ago very few people thought that there could be a human rights downside to online information services. Socially responsible investment funds considered tech companies a "clean play." As it turns out, while Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Cisco and others have done much to help wire the world and bring down global communications barriers, there are also well-documented ways in which all of these companies in one way or another have been used by - and in some cases actively helped - governments to manipulate and monitor their citizens in ways that violate Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which reads:

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers".

When it comes to environmental and labor practices, many major multinationals are actively and willingly involved in a number of multi-stakeholder procesess aimed to develop codes of corporate conduct - and to benchmark their behavior. They know they can't afford the consequences of not being socially responsible. Similar watchdog groups, benchmarking systems, and codes of corporate conduct need to be developed to help Internet and telecoms companies do the right thing.

Fortunately several major Internet companies have started talking behind closed doors to a group of non-governmental organizations, academic institutions, and human rights groups about how they can do a lot better than they've done so far. I imagine that over the long term we may see similar processes and frameworks emerging that we have seen around environmental and labor standards. Nothing much has been said about these discussions publicly so until now, but as Human Rights Watch reported this summer:

Since the February 2006 congressional hearing, an academic working group from the Berkeley China Internet Project of the Graduate School of Journalism of the University of California at Berkeley (BCIP); the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School; and the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University have been working to draft a globally applicable corporate code of conduct, plus policy recommendations to facilitate the fullest possible support for such standards by governments, international organizations, and trade bodies. The Center for Democracy and Technology is also facilitating discussions about a code of conduct between academics, activists, think-tanks, and representatives of some of the companies named in this report. Details of these codes are still under development and have yet to be announced publicly.
[my link added]

I hope the companies involved in these discussions will come out of the closet soon. I think it will help them improve user trust - and their tarnished corporate images - if they do so. It will show which Internet and telecoms companies are truly leaders in an effort toward corporate social responsibility, and which companies have so far failed to make an important step towards respecting their users' rights globally. Those companies who are taking their users' rights seriously deserve to be given public credit for doing so.

Comments

[allan]

We still have such a long way to go.

Thanks for the update.

[Eloise Bannister]

Hi. I haven't been on this site long, I'm just browsing. This subject seemded interesting so I deceided to read a lot more of it. Right now my husband is having trouble with a company that doesn't believe in being socially responsible or anything else. Can you recommend some lawyers for this problem? Thank you and your site.