Centerfield

Ethics in Dealing With Tyrannies

Tnis controversy reminds me of a potential ethical problem I was beginning to confront in a company I started, just as it fell over. Mind you, I tend to think that Yahoo was wrong, but they were in a tough spot since they have a presence there, and I think it was a decision made there. They should have looked ahead and prepared for this, though.

Pushcache.com was selling products and services based on Squid web proxy servers modded to do push (called peer-to-peer now). Our first big customer was a Canadian project using them to push web content to schools via a government-funded satellite broadcast.

Now, it so happens that proxy servers are a popular spot to put web filters. Squid has good support for filtering. A Singaporean researcher helped speed one aspect of filtering up, for example. At that time, they used Squid for a lot of their filtering because it's price is right - free.

Just as the business plan failed, they told me that the Chinese government was interested in my software for a similar project. It would've been even more beneficial than Canada, because it would've reached a lot more children, and done more for their web services because their other links are worse. It would've had real impact. Doubtless, they would've installed filters in it, though (Canada did too, but of course for porn filtering rather than to limit access to anti-governmental sites).

Business failure spared me this choice. Should I have chosen to support the children or freedom?