Internet Marketing As A Freedom Issue

As you are completely surrounded by advertisements both in the real world and online, it may be hard to believe that internet marketing could be adversely affected by policies relating to internet freedom, or that in its turn, it could create problems for that freedom. But that’s just one issue that is going to face users and creators of broadband internet services in the future. This is another instance of how globalization has tied everything together; marketing issues are going to be partly tied to other issues like censorship and freedom of speech.

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.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is one of the people who explicitly links internet marketing with internet freedom and even political freedom. She has given two speeches on the topic of internet freedom within the past year, in fact. One linked the open internet with freedom of religion, a value promoted in the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. The other explained the Obama administration’s belief that an open net leads to the ability to acquire knowledge and improve one’s position through potential market opportunities. So Clinton urges that world governments open up the internet to allow their people these opportunities.

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.

The formation of internet policy, for any specific government, is actually a three-sided problem. To begin with, every government injects its own political viewpoint into its policies. But then it must deal with questions of whether the wider culture is more accustomed to a top-down form of government, or is based on an individualistic philosophy. And after these considerations come questions of how business matters are or should be handled in that culture. All three considerations will determine the type of online access people have in the society.

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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