Growing passion for self-censorship among American IT firms

 Update April 19: LinkedIn seems to have realized this was no good policy and restored access to Syrian users.

While I find the recent efforts by the U.S. State Department to reach out to young people in the Middle East and other problematic regions over the Internet and cellphones laudable (at least in theory, if not in execution), I am getting increasingly concerned that other parts of the U.S. government — namely the Departments of Commerce and the Treasury — are not taking enough steps to clarify the rules that govern the export and use of American Web services by users based in the same very regions. This creates a situation where activities of one arm of the U.S. government cancel much of what the other arm is trying to do.

It’s a very disturbing trend that more and more American IT companies prefer to stay away from dealing with Syrians, Iranians, and even Belarusians and Zimbabweans altogether simply because they may find themselves violating U.S. government rules that govern how business should be done with states that are considered sponsors of terrorism or the ones which have economic sanctions imposed on them for other reasons.

I wrote about it last month for Newsweek, documenting how BlueHost, one of the biggest hosting companies in the world, prefers not to deal with individuals from a whole host of countries (even though some of those individuals are also supported by the U.S. government to promote democracy in their countries).

Today, thanks to a post over at Global Voices Advocacy, I learned that LinkedIn, the most popular professional networking site, has made itself unavailable to all users in Syria. Here’s an email that a LinkedIn customer rep sent to one of the complaining users:

Per the terms of our User Agreement, use of LinkedIn services, including our software, is subject to export and re-export control laws and regulations. This includes the Export Administration Regulations maintained by the United States Department of Commerce and sanctions programs maintained by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. Under the User Agreement, LinkedIn Users warrant that they are not prohibited from receiving U.S. origin products, including services or software. As such, and as a matter of corporate policy, we do not allow member accounts or access to our site from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, or Syria.

Now, LinkedIn can, of course, do whatever it wants, even without consulting the rules of the U.S. government. When writing my Newsweek piece last month, I did quite a lot of research and I wasn’t able to identify any provisions that would simply BAN LinkedIn from providing its services to Syrians; doing this may be a bit more complicated than providing the same services, say, to Germans — but it’s still possible, with a certain amount of paperwork. I guess what LinkedIn — and several other Web companies before it — have figured out that the revenue they make on Syrian users simply doesn’t cover the compliance costs — so they dropped them altogether.

This raises several interesting questions:

1. Are U.S. government rules so complex that a big international company finds it hard or prohibitively expensive to follow them? Do we really need rules that would require a Web company to consult the US government about such a seemingly petty thing as extending its social networking services to users in countries that are unfriendly to the U.S.? Even if someone were crazy enough to plan a terrorist attack on LinkedIn — rather than on some private and secure local social network — should it really be a matter of filing additional paperwork?

2. LinkedIn is not the first company to do this; they are also probably not the last. What happens if all other big Web companies — Facebook, Twitter, MySpace- follow its lead? As these big online platforms are also increasingly used for online activism, driving their most active users from countries that need such activism away from such platforms seems to be a very bad idea. Imagine if the 70 Moldovans who attempted the Twitter Revolution were "twittering" on some local Moldovan service which nobody really knew about  – this is what we may get if other companies follow LinkedIn’s lead here. We want American IT companies to build bridges between cultures, not to burn them.

3. While I am skeptical that there exist some reliable legal routes of addressing this issue, why not treat LinkedIn’s actions as bad corporate citizenship – essentially accusing them of stalling the democratization process in countries  that are very important for the U.S.? This would seem to be a very appropriate response – and if it can have at least one tenth of attention that #amazonfail got, it would already be very successful.

What do you all think?