In a timely follow up to my post yesterday on whether companies need a foreign policy, Google has effectively delivered an ultimatum to China.

The ultimatum essentially says "let us provide uncensored Google in China or we will shut Google.cn". Naturally, no one expects China to accede to Google's wishes.

The background an a good analysis are provided by Imagethief here.

Imagethief does not mention the meeting between Internet business leaders and Hillary Clinton last week, and I cannot help but feel that the timing of this announcement is linked to that meeting even if there are broader events leading up to this. Eric Schmidt is simply too close to the Obama administration to do this on the fly. Certainly to China it will look like it is, and if there is one thing that was acknowledged in that meeting it is that any stand US companies take in relation to human rights in China will be viewed by China as a proxy move by the US.

While Imagethief notes and the Wall Street Journal implies that Google's eventual withdrawal from China on human rights grounds makes it really difficult for Microsoft to remain, I would be very surprised if Microsoft, the State Department and others did not already know of the move before Google dropped today's bombshell.

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US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held a dinner last week for the tech industry's key leaders. It looks to me like the consolidation of a trend.

I attended a talk a few years back and I am struggling to recall where it was. It was either in Boston or in Washington. Anyway the talk was given by a recently retired general counsel of a mahor corporation - perhaps IBM, perhaps GM. The main argument of the talk was that corporations need a foreign policy. I thought the idea was instantly exciting and terrifying.

Exciting because back then I had recently written a paper on "Legitimacy risks and peacebuilding opportunities for businesses in post-conflict Iraq". The fact is that businesses have presence, relationships and power and they will have an impact on communities and even nations whether they have a policy or not.
 

Terrifying because, as that paper had tried to make clear, legitimacy was key, and in the Iraq situation the absence of inclusiveness and accountability pretty much assured that the reconstruction effort would lack local goodwill. Think about how the reconstruction contracts were allocated, the absence of community involvement in allocation, the lack contract winners of Iraqi origin, then the failure of firms that undertook the work to do so from the outset with a solid local outreach and inclusion approach.

There are plenty of extractive industry firms with a substantial involvement in foreign affairs, too often with dubious and opaque relationships supporting regimes run by corrupt elites.

It is the global technology firm - particularly though not exclusively the internet-based firms - that is new to the art of running aground on foreign policy issues in most recent years. So I was very interested to hear about a small private dinner hosted by Hilary Clinton last week with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey, Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie. The subject under discussion: how technology can be used to meet the nation’s foreign diplomacy goals.

It is a topic I touched on here during the first major upheavals in Iran when twitter played such a role: Iran, business models and the right to tweet speech. The basic argument of that post - that access to twitter is crucial to freedom of speech - has been echoed in a State Departent blog post which said the agency wanted to use twitter in a contest as a:

"worldwide platform in which people can discuss the meaning of democracy and exchange ideas from diverse perspectives."

My thoughts/questions are these:

1/ Is corporate foreign policy simply an alternate name for existing corporate responsibility issues with a global hue, like climate change or, in the internet company case privacy issues? Or is it - and I believe it is - something more, where corproations are taking on a responsibility to consider their impact on human rights within their sphere of activity in a more accountable, thus perhaps quasi-public way?

2/ how do we assure legitimacy? How can we bring the right kind of transparency and inclusivity to corporate statecraft to ensure that it is just?

3/ global corporations are based in dozens of countries. Is there a question of to which foreign policy it needs to align its own?

Do you have any views?

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I was intrigued to see this news article on the BBC website this morning: WHO warns against homeopathy use.

Quickly, throw open the door of your medicine cabinet and eject all those little white homeopathic tabs; the World Health Organization after careful consideration reflecting its singular position of authority has clearly at last come down firmly on the side of homeopath sceptics.

Except that is not really what the article says.

Firstly the article is not talking about homeopathy in general but is instead focused on the problem of homeopathic remedies being promoted as primary medication for developing world sufferers of TB, infant diarrhoea, influenza, malaria and HIV. Not even the Royal Homeopathic Hospital in London agrees with reliance on homeopathic remedies for such conditions, according to a comment by Dr Robert Hagan - a St Andrews University researcher quoted in the BBC article.

I am not particularly convinced that homeopathy works, and so I agree with the assertion that people with HIV, TB and the like should not RELY on homeopathy at the expense of readily available conventional medicine.

Even so, I detect more than the passing hand of the pharmaceutical industry behind this article.

The letter to the WHO by the young doctors concerned reliance on homeopathy at the expense of conventional medicine, but the headline suggests that the WHO has come out completely against the use of homeopathic treatments, full stop. The headline is sensationalist and incorrect in the breadth of its assertion.

Secondly, the article ignores the problem of access to conventional medicine even though it is focused on the developing world where the problem of the prohibitive cost of drugs is well documented. Homeopathy may be little more than a placebo for all I know, but better that in desperate situations where the patient has little hope of being able to get something that actually works.

The primary source for the story is Sense About Science which, a small amount of googling reveals, is a pharmaceutical industry-funded astroturfing unit whose main aim would indeed have been to get a headline suggesting incorrectly that the WHO has come down firmly against treatments competing with pharmaceutical drugs.

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Following the announcement of 550 redundancies at French television broadcast operator TDF, workers detained the executive chairman.

Some 600 workers entered the building and kept Patrick Babin in his office until they departed to join a protest march.

The 550 redundancies are from a workforce of 2,400.

The group is owned by Texas Pacific, the American investment fund, and Axa, the French insurer.

There have been bossnappings at several firms in France this year including Sony, 3M, Caterpillar, and Scapa, the British glue maker.

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I've talked (ranted?) about this subject before: the modeling industry's exploitation, and occasional destruction, of 14-year-old girls.  A new documentary by model-turned-Cornell student Sara Ziff, shot over a five-year period, looks like it will give audiences a girl's-eye view of the industry.  Their view is not necessarily pretty. 

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This is a kind and gentle op/ed piece in the form of a letter to Pixar. The author loves Disney and Pixar and is not doing any kind of Disney-bashing. She is simply voicing the silent pleas and thoughts of so many American moms and women - Please give us a girl hero who our daughters can identify with; one they can see as one of themselves. Princesses are lovely and Disney princess are quite plucky. But most of us, and hence our little girls, are not royals or even aristrocrats. We go to school and work. We muck about in the mud, climb trees and sit down to tea parties. We lift weights, work out and we even sweat. So, Pixar and Disney, please, please, please consider your demographic and give us a girl lead character who never dons a tiara or even an evening gown.

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Here’s an interesting illustration of a trend that we’ve seen recently at VolunteerMatch.

On the one hand, our traffic rates to VolunteerMatch.org, while still steadily growing, have slowed down from the phenomenal rates we saw 2, 3 or 4 years ago. On the other hand, we’re getting more media calls and requests for partnerships than ever before.

Well, the latest Google Trends report for “volunteering” shows how our experience confirms the trend beyond our network.

According to the chart, since 2006, search volume for “volunteering” has been flat or shrinking and during that same time news references for “volunteering” have been steadily rising. The trend is even more pronounced for searches related to the word “volunteer.”

What gives?
 

• It could be that more people are using social networks to find a great place to volunteer and bypassing search tools like Google.com completely.
   
• It could be that lots of informal volunteering — much of it driven by social networks or by acting on problems that are visible in local communities — is beginning to redirect do-gooders from the world of “volunteering” toward unaffiliated service.
   
• It could also be that individual effort is being tapped out — ironically, at the same time that communities are recognizing that service can be a sustainable way to solve local problems.
   
• It could also be that nonprofits are improving their ability to go out into the Webosphere and local communities and locate and target the volunteer audiences they want to recruit. Such efforts would yield lots of volunteer hours without Google searches.
   
• It’s also possible that positive spin and upbeat press simply aren’t key drivers of service and volunteering.

What are some other possibilities? Curious what you all think.

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Merck paid medical publisher Elsevier to publish a few volumes of Merck-favored research with the appearance of a serious peer-reviewed journal.

Instead, the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine was in effect just company-sponsored marketing material without the sponsorship disclosure.

While the serious ethical breach by Merck is receiving much attention, I'd like to draw attention also to the bizarre ethical breach by the publisher.

Elsevier has a reputation as a serious publisher of peer-reviewed science, technical and medical journals. It knew that by attaching its name to this journal it would lead people into assuming that the same standards would apply to the information and views it contained.

Elsevier has a responsibility for its mind print. The information that it publishes can and will be taken and used for better or worse. Elsevier's corporate social responsibility page, however, prefers to talk about philanthropic and environmental initiatives.

Time for them to re-center on why they exist. Clue: it was not to squeeze an extra bit of revenue out of their brand by lending credence to Merck's blindingly unethical misstep.

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In the face of slipping ratings, the boys and girls at MTV and Viacom think that the "millennial" generation is looking for more substance, less escapism, in their television. 

While they're not exactly dropping their current crop of escapist, cynical fare (such as The Hills and, dear Lord, Paris Hilton's My New BFF)  they are introducing new shows featuring actual performing arts, altruism and civic engagement. 

Together with their falling ratings, MTV executives looked at sociological research that indicated that today's MTV audience is more socially engaged, less cynical, and less materialistic than those coming of age a decade ago.  NYTimes: "In the era that was passing, [MTV General Manger Stephen] Friedman said, “the humor was more cynical, the idea of community seemed earnest and not cool. It’s the opposite now.”  

Sadly, there's nothing to indicate that this change of direction is permanent for MTV: the current cultural shift is compared by Van Toffler, President of MTV Networks, to the late 1990's shift from Grunge to Britney Spears.  Which is to say, when a new, shallow, materialistic, escapist zeitgeist arrives, MTV will be the first to stuff the flannel shirts of altrusim in the trash.

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The online retailer has announced that it will not permit Phorm to track user activity on its site.

Phorm tracks user activity in order to help internet service providers serve up advertising related to a user's interests. Privacy groups have asked major internet retailers including Amazon to opt out of Phorm.

The Amazon move comes as the company defends another human rights related accusation for apparently sifting out books related to homosexuality from its best seller rankings.

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