Netweeper Inc. - A Canadian Company That Facilitates Internet Censorship Abroad

In an age when regulation of shoddy business practices seems to be rapidly eroding, the ethos today being that anything inhibiting growth is bad, it may not come as a surprise that both the Federal and the Ontario Provincial Governments are complicit in inhibiting the free flow of information in countries with repressive regimes.

The latest Canadian salvo against human rights is revealed in a story appearing in today's Toronto Star. Entitled Canada needs clear cyberspace censorship policy, watchdog says, the piece reveals how both levels of government virtually endorsed a Guelph-based company that produces content-filtering software that it sells to repressive countries to control what is available to their citizens on the Internet. In the United Arab Emirates, Netsweeper Inc., which has received Canadian government grants, presented a domestic telecom called Du with an award for its use of green technology. Representatives of both the Harper and McGuinty governments were on hand for the ceremony, but as reported in The Star, the problem is this:

Du uses Netsweeper software to block content from UAE Internet users, including political, religious and human rights material, according to the Open Net Initiative, a collective of researchers that track Internet censorship and surveillance.

The question we, as Canadians, have to ask ourselves is whether it is right to both fund and endorse companies that make it easier for such countries to repress their citizens. Do we take a stand based on common principle, or do we hew to the egregiously amoral philosophy that markets will decide the fate of such enterprises?