Cisco can’t live down selling gear to China for censorship

Selling gear to the Chinese government is a controversial subject for many networking companies, especially

Cisco, a recent story in Network World explores. Back in the 2004-2005 timeframe, Cisco was criticized by human rights groups for selling mirroring routers to China for its Internet censorship program. Cisco says it sold its standard off-the-shelf routers to China and isn’t responsible for how China uses them. This remains a hot-button issue for Cisco. The subject came up in a recent Network World interview with James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, who has experienced the Chinese Internet filtering system first-hand:

Q. Cisco says it sold China the same mirroring routers that it makes available to any organization that needs to monitor Internet usage by its employees. If that’s true, why should Cisco be criticized more than any other network vendor that sells gear to the Chinese?

A. At the time, Cisco did a favor to the Chinese government several years ago by selling them the mirroring routers on which the Great Firewall is based, at a time when Chinese authorities could not easily have produced the systems on their own. The likely use of the routers was well understood – and it should be obvious why selling them to a government which intends to monitor its citizens is different from selling them to some company that wants to monitor its on-the-clock employees. But whatever the merits of the argument back then, the entire question is now moot. The Chinese authorities could buy the necessary routers from a variety of sources – notably from the homegrown firm Huawei.

I think Cisco is right. Given how many countries conduct some monitoring and censorship of Internet content — see list here https://www.efa.org.au/Issues/Censor/cens3.html — Cisco would be losing out on a big market opportunity if it refused to sell routers to these governments. Nonetheless, U.S. companies like Cisco, Juniper and Sun that provide network infrastructure equipment to such countries as China, Singapore and Saudi Arabia shouldn’t customize their products to help these countries repress their citizens.

READ MORE of the interview with Fallows.

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