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John Sumser
jrsumser@interbiznet.com, San Francisco, CA. Sunday Feb 18, 1996

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My business includes helping other businesses to be more effective. One of the major missing components from the free speech conversation is a simple question. "Why is Free Speech important to business?" This short essay is my attempt to wrestle with the answer.

The Foundation Of A Free Market Is Free Expression

This morning,Dave Winer wrote: "Look, I'm angry with Bill Clinton for putting us in bed with the bible-thumpers." He went on to wonder why his project to demonstrate for freedom of expression was falling short. He lost me when he mixed his religious prejudice with his quest to support free expression. My response? His email hit the trash can before I finished it.

Later this morning, an anonymous kid called my office and screamed an obscenity in my ear. My response? I called the phone company and had the "*69" service installed. It returns a phone call to the last caller. Should there be a next time, I will call the kid's parents using the new service. Thankfully, that sort of offensive speech is regulated on the telephone system. If the parents don't take action, I have other avenues with the phone company and the local police department.

I have a right not to listen and not to hear.

Dave's says the 24 hours of Democracy project is at risk of failure. Why do you suppose that is? Over 10,000 web business people and job seekers saw my pointers to the project. Yet, I received no email. Why do you suppose that is? Language like "the greatest risk to liberty in 50 years" is freely tossed around. No one replies. Why do you suppose that is?

Recently, I was called a "Nazi" for suggesting that a moderate course might be more effective. By a strident supporter of the various protests, no less.

Some of my peers are up in arms over the subject. But, when I ask, "Why is free speech good for business?", they remain remarkably mute.

These very same folks protest the use of the Net as a mass mailing medium while they proclaim their faith in free speech. They alienate their sources of potential support. The inconsistencies aren't understood in the ranks of the converted. They are preaching to the choir while the church empties out.

While they weren't looking, the Web was settled by entrepreneurs and risk takers...small and medium sized business people. The new colonizers of the net take risks as a way of life. They don't take them just because someone else says they should. They want to know the benefit or potential benefit before they blindly follow an inarticulate call to arms. They want to know the bottom line. They think for themselves.

Why is free speech good for business? Or is it?

Really good new ideas, the heart of innovation, are usually viewed as heresies when first seen. Every entrepreneur has this experience. New worlds are colonized by criminals and pirates, it's historical fact. Frightening new ideas are pooh-poohed and banned. The creative edge is always just a little hard to behold from a mainstream perspective.

Centers for new development are more effective when they're segregated from the rest of an organization's culture. Skunkworks and contract think-tanks are the business world's method for keeping innovation moving. Businesses recognize the critical value of free speech, yet they often prefer to try to contain it in back rooms.

Why?

If you listen to the current advocates, free speech is a universal thing. It applies in all settings at all times regardless of other contracts or contexts. In a business setting, however, freedom of expression is a limited, if very useful, tool. The importance of regulated speech in a business setting is recognized, through legislation, by enforced limits regarding ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, the display of "objectionable" materials and so on. As a tool, free speech in business is useful to the extent that it either furthers the mission or allows errors to be exposed.

Businesses often segregate their free thinkers from the mainstream so that the primary goals of the operation may be accomplished. For example, it is not useful to consider the relative merits of a project during a delivery peak. Broad design alternatives are best kept to the early phases. From time to time, implementation is all that matters and dissenting voices are merely distractions. Wisely and correctly applied, the use of free speech as a business tool makes the difference between a successful enterprise and a wannabe. Uncritically applied, it tends to create actionless committees.

Free speech is, from time to time, required for business success. Even with its distracting downsides, most business people are aware of the importance of breakthrough ideas and understand that freedom of expression is the source of those ideas.

Why isn't there a mad rush to protest?

Like many political questions, it all boils down to whose ox is being gored. Or, who knows that their ox is being gored. Even though the Web is fundamentally a publishing medium, few on-line business people see themselves as publishers. Just learning (and inventing) the ropes is a full time occupation. Shifts in self-concept happen long after the evidence has accumulated to support the idea.

Publishers, as a group, have a vested interest in stopping censorship in its tracks. At a minimum, censorship causes significant increases in overhead as legal and moral reviews get added to the publication process. A quick reflection on late night television monologues will reveal countless references to the interference of network censors. The censors end up being additional members of a publisher's payroll with the job of preventing financial or legal exposure. The result is increased levels of sameness, not vibrant market discriminators.

When the standards are as vague as the current legislation, the possibility of "definition creep" enters the equation. The law on the books prohibits "indecent" communication without ever defining it. Since the Internet crosses every known cultural barrier, the only risk free approach that a business can take is to use the most conservative interpretation of "indecency" that can be imagined.

The question is what happens next.

The real problem with attempts to control public discourse comes when the tables are turned. Pornographers and fringe cultural figures are easy targets. People who confuse religious prejudice and free expression are easy to ignore. Evidenced by the lack of support for their protests, their mainstream allies are in short supply. Who's to say that the limits would stop there?

The attempt to censor speech on the Internet is worth a demonstration of concern. The law is unenforceable. The protest attempts are laughable, self centered and polarizing.

The threat is real.

Censorship grows like a rapid and fatal cancer. It distracts from business, increases costs and limits innovation. Once it takes hold as a moral tool, it rapidly spreads to political and commercial discourse. Like a progressive cancer, the best (and easiest) time to stop it is upon initial discovery.

In a small community like the Web, concern for important issues creates very strange bedfellows. In this case, it's important to overlook the messengers and focus on the threat they've identified. The foundation of a free market is free expression.

John Sumser