Do-it-yourself embargoes from Microsoft

Here comes another installment in the never-ending series "American companies limit freedom of expression in countries that need it most": Microsoft has unexpectedly turned off Windows Live Messenger in five embargoed countries (Cuba, Syria, Iran, Sudan, and North Korea). Users trying to log-in to MSN would be met with this message: "810003c1: We were unable to sign you in to the .NET Messenger Service"; no other reasons would be given. In an official statement on its website, Microsoft points to the regulations of the US Treasuary’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on conducting business with embargoed countries. 

I’ve already covered this topic at length (here and here, for example); in short, increasingly more tech companies prefer to err on the conservative side and simply overblock users in repressive countries. This is quite rational: they lose very little in advertising revenue while avoiding potentially much greater fines from the US government. Whether this is good corporate citizenship and whether the US government should allow these comapnies to cite the various OFAC rules as the explanation of their actions are two questions that require more analysis. 

Here are a few points we need to consider here: 

First, OFAC hasn’t issued any new regulations on the subject; this means that Microsoft’s inexplicable decision was probably the result of their own internal deliberations and not the result of direct government pressure.This might be the beginning of a very dangerous trend: as Microsoft goes, so do the others. Imagine if tomorrow Skype, Twitter, Facebook, Google Docs, Basecamp and the host of other services suddently become unavailable to users in the embargoed countries. It’s easy to imagine that very soon users in North Korea, Cuba or Iran might be thrown back to the Web’s Dark Ages, where they would be prohibited from accessing the tools that are widely used by their peers in North Amerca or Europe. This is probably not the smartest way to solve the digital divide problem. 

Second, it’s ironic that the announcement from Microsoft coincided with the news of of Iran’s decision to re-ban Facebook. It seems that both the mainstream media and the blogosphere are paying considerably more attention to the Facebook debacle, while largely ignoring Microsoft’s own actions; yet, the net results are strikingly similar. I am wondering if it might be the right time to do a quantiative comparision of the harm caused by the growing self-censorship of US companies operating in repressive socieities versus the numerous censorship hardships created by the despotic leaders of these societies. 

Third, even though I understand that the Treasury Department is severely understaffed, this is no excuse for not updating the OFAC rules governing the export rules of technology to embargoed states. The vast majority of tech services on offer are harmless and could significantly benefit the opposition forces; there is no reason to ban them. Take the Cuban example: how could the US government still justify the harsh OFAC rules (which get even harsher in the ultra-conservative interpretation by risk-averse technology companies) when the Obama administration seems to be pursuing a policy of liberalization, going as far as easening the work of US telecoms firms in Cuba? 

The only upside to this story is that there are still a few ways to trick Microsoft into thinking that you are not, say, in Iran and still use all the unavailable services (see one such workaround mentioned in an Ars Technica post on the story). Paradoxically, the more barriers American companies erect for users in the embargoed countries, the more tech-savvy some of their users become: some of them learn how to use proxy servers, some discover and test more secure tools, yet others rely on  entirely new ways of communications; all of this could potentially make their activities harder to detect by the government surveillance agents. This may be an interesting instance of "innovation by constraint" in action.  

…In a recent commencement speech at Barnard College Hillary Clinton lauded the role that digital tools can play in empowering marginalized communities; she spoke of Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and even microlendings sites like Kiva. Well, it is certainly great that the US Secretary of State recognizes the importance of these tools; it would be even greater if she could talk to her colleagues over at the US Treasury and actually ask them to stop giving companies an excuse to block these tools in countries that need them most. Now, that would really be the change we can all believe in.