Collateral Freedom: Using Global Trade to Reshape Censor Incentives
Channel: Access Now
Date: 2014-03-24

David Robinson, Principal, Robinson + Yu LLC (Moderator) 

Jim Cowie, CTO, Renesys
Steve Schultze, Program Officer, Internet Freedom, U.S. Department of State 
"Ox", Lantern

Description:
Global trade complicates internet-censoring countries' incentives, and gives them a potentially strong reason to allow some encrypted, secure internet traffic to flow freely between their nation and the world. The common strength shared by widely used tools - such as VPNs and GoAgent - is that blocking them, while technologically easy, would be economically disruptive. This dynamic, called "Collateral Freedom," helps drive concrete work in new directions. This session examined the new and different ways to tie internet freedom to global commerce by asking how to best engage with cloud platforms like Google, Amazon, and Github, and asked whether diplomatic efforts now devoted expressly to internet freedom may be more effective if they focused on the free flow of information as an issue of commercial diplomacy.