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Internet Marketing As A Freedom Issue

July 28th, 2010 admin Leave a comment Go to comments

Here in the “free world” of western culture, internet marketing seems pretty straightforward; some company blasts internet ads at you and you try to ignore them, the same as on television. Even if you recognize the necessity of advertising, you might not think, as you close yet another annoying popup window, that marketing like this could be tied to censorship and online access in other countries. But the politics and economics of this and other types of marketing are becoming ever more intertwined.

Politics and business often go hand-in-glove, and as the internet gradually changes, internet marketing issues and political ones are becoming equally intertwined. Here, however, their relationship is still potentially more adversarial than cooperative. Many people are trying to link marketing freedom with freedom of speech and freedom from censorship. Much of this linkage is directed at China, in ways that aren’t at all subtle. But the Chinese government thus far is ignoring external pressures.

In a January, 2010 speech, Hillary Clinton described the Obama administration’s policy on free speech and internet freedom. In November of 2009 she pointed out that freedom of opinion and religion were not simply American values, having been enshrined in the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. But she went farther in January, stating that removing censorship from the internet not only would provide a pipeline to knowledge for many people, but could also improve people’s economic fortunes by providing access to potential markets for their services and goods. So internet marketing opportunities, according to Clinton, are part and parcel of other freedoms, like access to information and freedom of speech.

Connections between internet marketing and people living under oppressive regimes seem to be all one-way. That is, western companies go in and make money from “marketing opportunities” in those countries. But a newspaper in China rightly remarked that any Chinese company refusing to obey American laws would not be allowed to operate here, so Chinese laws should be respected. There was no mention, though, of the attacks on Google’s network. How the “marketing opportunities” Hillary Clinton foresees will play out in diverse cultures is something that may take a long time to work out in an equitable way.

Which internet policy you believe is best depends on which country you live in and how your culture functions. The American viewpoint is laden with words like “freedom,” “democracy” and “choice,” demanding that all governments have a hands-off policy, especially when it comes to business, most particularly American business. Other cultures, though, are not always as convinced that absolute freedom provides the ultimate good, and want to impose more limits on network services. It’s true that this can lead to oppressive policies, but what Americans view as “oppressive” or “totalitarian” isn’t always so black and white.

Other countries’ differing views stem partly from differences in culture as well as political philosophy. In Canada, free speech is a core belief, yet speech promoting hatred of identifiable groups is limited and sometimes even banned, since it is considered a type of harmful, verbal violence. Canada’s interest in “peace, order, and good government” is their equivalent of America’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And concern with the peacefulness and good governance of the wider society leads to an internet policy that might remove hate speech where American laws might leave it. This is not “oppression” or “totalitarianism,” but stems from a different view of what best serves the wider society.

What gets tricky is discerning when an internet policy is in place solely because of government oppression and when historic cultural values are also in play. Some policies and censorship implemented by China, for example, do stem from a desire to keep citizens ignorant and controlled. Yet in its centuries of history, a respect for a ruling authority and its right to exercise such control has also been part of the culture of the country. So as the two things intermingle, perhaps the country can’t be judged by American political standards.

Foreign governments can point out, quite correctly, that in most cases it is they who are expected to bend for the sake of US corporations doing internet marketing, rather than the other way around. They might be forgiven for a degree of cynicism about this seemingly American-made, one-way “solution” to questions about free speech and an open, uncensored internet. It may be that hopes for openness are in fact doomed, as long as this openness is linked to such a typically American approach to markets.

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