Microsoft in Russia
Par Guy Sorman - Mis en ligne le 17.09.2010 à 17:57
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All over the world, Internet users entertain romantic delusions about the cyberspace: to all of us, internet gives a false sense of freedom, power and anonymity. Once in a while, unsolicited messages and ads which happen to be founded on our most intimate habits, remind us that internet users are under constant watch. When the watchers have no other motives than commercial, we survive the obnoxious spams. In China or in Russia, however, internet will not be patrolled so much by the unsolicited peddlers than by the police. Russian human rights activists and the environment friendly organization Baikal Environmental Wave should thus not have been surprised when, on September, flesh and blood policemen - not bots – confiscated their computers and all files stocked on them. In the time of the Soviet Union, the police would have indicted these anti-Putin dissidents for mental disorders. This being the new Russia, cyberdissidents are being accused of intellectual property rights violation. They were using Microsoft equipped computers and could not prove that the software had not been pirated. Through the computers confiscation, the Russian police will supposedly verify that Microsoft software had been legally purchased.Microsoft and the Russian police look like strange bedfellows. But are they? Microsoft authorized representatives have declared that they could not oppose the Russian police move while the Seattle based company had to play by the Russian law. Such an ambiguous declaration may be interpreted both ways as an active support to the Russian police or a passive collaboration. Clearly, human right activists in Russia should not count Microsoft as an ally to build a more open society. Microsoft’s ambiguity should come as no surprise: the record of Internet companies in authoritarian countries is rather coherent and dim. Yahoo had been the authentic trendsetter, a pioneer in active collaboration with political repression. In 2005, Yahoo gave to the Chinese police the computer identification code of a dissident journalist, Shi Tao. Shi Tao had sent a message in praise of democracy which the censors had detected. Following Yahoo’s lead, the police arrested him: he is still in jail.At that time, Yahoo’s managers in the US, like Microsoft in Russia, declared that they had to follow the Chinese laws. Shi Tao, in his jail, was undoubtedly pleased to learn that China is ruled by laws, not by the Communist Party. After all, the rule of law is what Shi Tao is fighting for !Google in China, for a very short while, seemed to follow different guidelines: it acted in 2009 as if Google followed its often proclaimed ethical principles. To protest against censorship, the Silicon Valley based company moved out of mainland China in 2009 and it relocated its activity in near and still relatively free Hong Kong. On the Hong Kong based search engine, Chinese internauts could read about Taiwan, Tien Anmen massacre or the Dalai Lama. On Google.cn, these words, among many other forbidden terms, just did not appear. Google move seemed to reconcile its proclaimed libertarian philosophy, with its business ethics. The delusion did not last long: Google, after all, had accepted censorship from the very beginning, in 2006, to get access to the China market. Money talks: after 6 months, the service was reinstated in mainland China, censored again. Google lost face, not the Communist Party.Yahoo, Google, Microsoft have thus followed a strikingly similar road: access to lucrative markets, profitability have beaten any ethical anxiety. Those are profit making companies, no more and no less. The tools they provide are neutral: the dissidents try to use them to pursue a democratic agenda. The states police uses them to detect and repress dissidents. In the 1930s, IBM did sell its computing machines to the Nazi regime: the Nazis used these machines to compute their victims.Why should we be shocked by the Internet companies’ behavior in Russia and China? Those are ordinary corporations, like IBM was: profit is their motive. These companies will sometime hide their true colors behind fake democratic slogans: this is called advertisement. In advertisement or self promotion, the choice of words is determined by the customer expectations, not by the managers’philosophy, as they have none. Microsoft in Russia like Yahoo and Google in China are morality tales: Internet is no free lunch, but a capitalist product. One may not like capitalism: but an efficient not for profit search engine or any reliable software are nowhere to be found beyond the market. So called « open sources » are just free-riders which use existing infrastructures. And non capitalist economies did not invent Internet, neither the computer.Capitalism is always a trade off: we have to live with unethical behavior by money making corporations which provide us with useful new tools. These tools can be used to compute the number of exterminated Jews, to arrest a Chinese dissident, to break a human rights group in Russia. The same tools can be used by the Iranians fighting dictatorship or by Tibetan dissidents trying to save their culture. Microsoft in Russia or Google in China teach us that capitalism is not ethical: it is only efficient. Entrepreneurs are greedy by definition: if they were not, they would turn bankrupt. An open society will never be sustained by righteous entrepreneurs nor be the mere by product of the right engineering: liberty remains the endeavor of free men.
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