And boycott Yahoo for grassing up dissidents to the Chinese government.

And Google for the Great Firewall of China.

The problem is boycotting multinationals from the level of the individual is going to have zero effect. Nada. That’s why we can skweam and skweam and skweam about the likes of Google, but it’s not going to have any effect. Not until the US government blocks trade with China. Which it won’t do any time soon.

Now there are over a billion Nokia handsets in use worldwide. If a boycott of Google is fruitless, other than earning you dinner party brownie points a boycott of Nokia is even more so, especially [as is rightly pointed out above] they are popular in the developing world for providing cheap energy-efficient handsets, responsible for covertly documenting human rights abuses coming from places such as Iran.

Incidentally, I saw one blogger squirming when the software Fring was revealed as the Iranian social-networking tool of choice [for the non-techies it connects to Yahoo, MSN, AIM, Skype etc. and allows file transfers e.g. vids/pics] Why? It is an Israeli run operation. A boycott of Israel would involve a boycott of Fring [which were a boycott in effect would probably never have made it into development...] thus depriving Iranian dissidents of one of the most useful tools in their arsenal.

Boycotts tend to be little more than vehicles for politicos to get all holier than thou and I’m afraid this one looks to be no exception.

Yes of course Muslims doing anything is gesture politics and vying for attention.

There are a few bigger organizations on the in Washington who pay lip service to many things.

Why was there no call to boycott Nokia or other pohone providers when the British government utlised the same technology to illegally hear the conversation between Muslim MP’s and their constituents who were in prison on terrorism charges?

Supporting your side in Iran is one thing, this is fringing on interference in Irans internal affairs.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/203143

I don’t think Nokia should be helping Iran to tackle dissent.

We should support this petition and make Iran heed the call to respect the rights of the individuals who stood up to an oppressive regime.

P.

Thanks Paul, Jono, interesting to know and interesting to hear your experiences. I hope the strength of consumer power, which by itself doesn’t address the root of the problem, does succeed in bringing some pressure on companies – the language of self-interest is universal.

I work out in China and have a few problems typing in certain words into my google search engine – and Youtube is still not active – and Wordpress equally is not accessible.

There’s no actual evidence of election fraud in Iran. Such claims and counter-claims have been compiled at IranAffairs.com–go see for yourself

Mousavi was vetted and cleared to run for office because he’s a regime insider — and yet some people think he presented such a large threat to the regime that they had to resort to massive election fraud to keep him out office? Use your brains.

I once worked for a company that wanted to implement such software in China; we saw a product spec which included example of searching for words such as “democracy” and “Nepal”. The head honcho justified it by saying that the US was just as bad (no, he wasn’t a Socialist Unity contributer) and that, as a Catholic, he wouldn’t do anything evil, therefore , selling such software could not be evil. After much staff lobbying, the idea was shelved. I imagine other companies had no such scruples.

P.

Full disclosure: I am a Nokia employee, but not in the relevant department (NSN is administered separately), and my understanding comes from public statements and not internal comms, which I couldn’t tell you about anyway.

If so, they should be uncovered.

It is outrageous that Nokia are putting their money and their mouth behind what might actually prevent open communication – the anti-thesis of what their ‘brand’ is .