How Congress Might Accidentally Ban US Companies From Doing Business In The US

from the double-standard? dept

A couple of years ago, we wrote about a proposal to restrict search engine companies from doing business in foreign countries whose Internet policies the United States government deems "repressive." In March, we noted that it was back. Jonathan Zittrain has written up an analysis of the latest version. It would supposedly "prevent US companies from aiding the censorship and surveillance operations of repressive foreign governments." It would target "Internet Restricting Countries," which are countries that are "directly or indirectly responsible for a systematic pattern of substantial restrictions on Internet freedom."

Now, I understand that the intent is to target truly repressive regimes like China and Cuba, but I have to wonder about how this is being defined. After all, you could argue that the United States's gambling ban is a "substantial restriction on Internet freedom." Ditto for the recent FISA bill, which allows warrantless dragnet surveillance of Americans' international calls. Likewise, some European countries restrict Internet freedom with regard to Nazi memorabilia. And of course the Australian government forces its ISPs to censor online pornography. Will American companies be prohibited from doing business in the United States, France, Germany, and Australia? Somehow I doubt it. All of which is to say that putting the US government in charge of drawing up a list of countries with bad Internet policies seems like a bad idea. The list will wind up being a political football rather than an objective assessment of countries' internet policies, and in any event it will hurt American businesses a lot more than it will promote human rights abroad.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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More Companies Using Experimental Economists

from the a-step-forward dept

While it's true that it's difficult to find economists who agree with each other, that doesn't mean (as some would like you to believe) that economics is useless. The basic principles behind economics are pretty sound. The issues generally come up in how people interpret putting specific situations into economic models. That's because there are so many variables in real world economics, it's nearly impossible to model them all. So, the different opinions coming from different economists tend to be based on what sorts of variables they throw into models, and how they weight them. The truth is, however, that there's plenty of good things to be learned from the various models and experiments done by economists in various fields to try to narrow down those variables and perfect those models.

And, of course, those models can be quite practical. So it's great to see more and more companies (especially in the tech world) hiring experimental economists and putting them to work to start making more economically sound decision making, rather than seat-of-the-pants decisions on ways to adapt new business models, products and pricing. While there will still be plenty of mistakes, there will be a much better overall understanding of what works and why.

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