Tuesday, 26 June 2007

Treat Internet Censorship as Trade Barrier: Google to US

The world’s biggest search engine and the fastest growing IT company Google has urged the US government to fight the rise of global Internet censorship...

The world’s biggest search engine and the fastest growing IT company Google has urged the US government to fight the rise of global Internet censorship.

Google has urged the Departments of State and Commerce, the Office of the US Trade Representative, and various House and Senate committees, to look into the matter. Google's Director of Public Policy and Government Affairs Andrew McLaughlin said in a prepared statement that censorship acts as a non-tariff trade barrier for industries that depend on the free flow of information to deliver their services across borders.

He said;” For Google, censorship constitutes the single greatest trade barrier we currently face. We are not interested in forcing the US Constitution's First Amendment on other countries. Rather 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.”

Google has also appealed to Governments in Europe to take censorship as a threat to free flow of information. Of late here have been instances of state governments threatening to ban or have banned certain sites in their countries deemed to be a threat to national interest and security.

According to a study released last month by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) found that states generally justified censorship as protecting property rights and national security, preserving cultural and religious values, and fighting pornography and child exploitation.