Over at the Google Public Policy Blog, there’s an interesting post about recent efforts by Google to lobby the State Department and USTR to treat censorship as a trade barrier. Andrew McLaughlin writes:
Just as the U.S. government has, in decades past, utilized its trade negotiation powers to advance the interests of other U.S. industries, we would like to see the federal government take to heart the interests of the information industries and treat the elimination of unwarranted censorship as a central objective of our bilateral and multilateral trade agendas in the years to come.
But my hope is that the U.S. government can begin to move – incrementally, agreement-by-agreement, over the coming decade and beyond – to include in our bilateral and, eventually, multilateral trade agreements the notion that trade in information services should presumptively be free, absent some good reason to the contrary.
I can see how censorship hurts U.S. IT companies, especially if entire sites like YouTube are blocked when governments object to some user-generated content. But good luck to our trade negotiators in getting China or other repressive governments to loosen their grip over information!
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.