Clearly Google is searching for a way to do business in China that avoids them sending someone to jail over an e-mail.

Facebook and Google are battling over who will be our gateway to the rest of the Internet through ‘like‘ buttons and universal logins – giving them huge power over our online identities and activities.

For years, members of Congress have heard from constituents who want them to protect the nation from crime, terrorism and intellectual property violation. They have not faced equally robust demands that online rights and freedoms be preserved.

It becomes dangerous for somebody who doesn’t want their boss to know their sexual preference to use online networks to push for laws supporting gay marriage or same-sex partner rights if they can’t do so with a pseudonym.

Radio was used powerfully by Josef Goebbels to disseminate Nazi propaganda, and just as powerfully by King George VI to inspire the British people to fight invasion.

The relationship between citizens and government is increasingly mediated through the Internet.

Taiwan politics certainly is colorful.

We have to start thinking of ourselves as citizens of the Internet, not just passive users. I don’t see how we can bring about change in our digital lives if we don’t take responsibility.

In January 2012, Google Plus started to roll out support for nicknames and pseudonyms, but those registering with a name other than their real-life one must be able to prove that they have been using that alternative name elsewhere, either on the Web or in real life.

Despite the Obama administration‘s proclaimed commitment to global Internet freedom, the executive branch is not transparent about the types and capabilities of surveillance technologies it is sourcing and purchasing – or about what other governments are purchasing the same technology.

Each and every one of us has a vital part to play in building the kind of world in which government and technology serve the world’s people and not the other way around.

A lot of Chinese don’t understand why people in the West are critical of China.

While Google no longer has a search engine operation inside China, it has maintained a large presence in Beijing and Shanghai focused on research and development, advertising sales, and mobile platform development.

We’re at a point in history that whether the Internet is going to evolve in a way that’s compatible with democracy and human rights is really kind of up in the air.

Whether it’s Baidu or Chinese versions of YouTube or Sina or Sohu, Chinese Internet sites are getting daily directives from the government telling them what kinds of content they cannot allow on their site and what they need to delete.

The basic technical protocols that have enabled the Internet to work in such a globally interconnected way are developed and shared openly by a community of engineers.

While American intellectual property deserves protection, that protection must be won and defended in a manner that does not stifle innovation, erode due process under the law, and weaken the protection of political and civil rights on the Internet.

Consistently, Baidu has censored politically sensitive search results much more thoroughly than Google.cn.

In the future, ‘the networked’ will sometimes form alliances with the Silicon Valley companies against Congress, but sometimes we are going to want and need to target our campaigns for change at the companies themselves.

Research In Motion, the owner of BlackBerry, has been asked by a range of governments to comply with surveillance requirements.

Democratic institutions are based on a reality of human nature: that those with power, however benign or even noble their intentions, will do what they can to keep it.

As in Pakistan, Tunisian and Egyptian human rights activists are concerned that any censorship mechanisms, once put in place, will inevitably be abused for political purposes no matter what censorship proponents claim to the contrary.

Governments clash with each other over who should control the co-ordination of the Internet’s infrastructure and critical resources.

It took a generation for companies to recognise their responsibilities in terms of labour practices and another generation for them to recognise their environmental obligations.

Digital power is every bit as likely to be abused as physical power, but is often more insidious because it is often wielded in the background until its results manifest themselves in the offline world.

Each of us has a vital role to play in building a world in which the government and technology serve the world’s people and not the other way around.

The Chinese government clearly does pay attention to public opinion expressed on the Internet – the extent to which they choose to adapt their practices based on it, or ignore it, seems to vary.

Citizens’ rights cannot be protected if their digital activities are governed and policed by opaque and publicly unaccountable corporate mechanisms.

To have a .cn domain, you have to be a registered business. You have to prove your site is legal.

So long as confusion reigns, there will be no successful global Internet agenda, only contradiction.

Almost every week, there are stories in the press or on Chinese social media about what even the official Chinese media call ‘hot online topics:’ stories about how people in a particular village or town used Weibo to expose malfeasance by local or regional authorities.

Most people who use the Internet seem take its nature and characteristics for granted, like we take air and water for granted.

The Chinese government sometimes shuts down the Internet and mobile services in specific areas where unrest occurs.

When controversial speech can be taken offline through pressures on private intermediaries without any kind of due process, that is something we need to be concerned about.

I first came to China as a child on a visit with my family in 1978.

Even in democratic society, we don’t have good answers how to balance the need for security on one hand and the protection of free speech on the other in our digital networks.

On Apple‘s special store for the Chinese market, apps related to the Dalai Lama are censored, as is one containing information about the exiled Uighur dissident leader Rebiya Kadeer. Apple similarly censors apps for iPads sold in China.

Social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter should be urged to adhere to business practices that maximize the safety of activists using their platforms.

Internet freedom is a bit of a Rorschach test: it means different things to different people.

Companies should have a due diligence process to determine the likelihood that their technologies will be used to carry out human rights abuses before doing business with a particular country or distributor.

If I were a Chinese dissident, I’d be grateful that Cisco had helped bring the Internet to China, but I’d also be outraged that Cisco may have helped the cops keep me under surveillance and catch me trying to organize protest activities.

I know plenty of people in China who don’t like what their government does to the Falun Gong, but they don’t want to entrust their data to the Falun Gong, either.

The erosion of privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment, written to protect us against unreasonable search and seizure, began in earnest under President George W. Bush.

Normalization of U.S.-China relations in 1979, combined with economic reforms and opening, transformed the Chinese people’s lives.

Whatever Tencent can see, the Chinese government can see.

Many of the Kuomintang elite in Taiwan have relatives among the ruling elite here on mainland China.

Amazon webhosting dropped Wikileaks as a customer after receiving a complaint from U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, despite the fact that Wikileaks had not been charged, let alone convicted, of any crime.

Anything illegal under Chinese law is, of course, not protected by copyright.

Google attempted to run a search engine in China, and they ended up giving up.

There is clearly a constituency that appreciates the message that Google is sending, that it finds the Chinese government’s attitude to the Internet and censorship unacceptable.

Laws and mechanisms originally meant to enforce copyright, protect children and fight online crime are abused to silence or intimidate political critics.

Intermediary liability enables the Chinese authorities to minimize the number of people they need to put in jail in order to stay in power and to maximize their control over what the Chinese people know and don’t know.

One thing is very clear from the chatter I see on Chinese blogs, and also from just what people in China tell me, is that Google is much more popular among China’s Internet users than the United States.

WikiLeaks published the Afghan War Logs and U.S. diplomatic cables stolen from a classified network by an Army private.

There is a broad movement that has been holding companies accountable on human rights for a long time.

It’s harder and harder for journalists to get out in the field and interview Iraqis. The Web can get these voices out easily and cheaply.

Facebook has a rule that you’re not supposed to be anonymous.

Negative views of Pakistan expressed by prominent members of the global business community are taken more seriously by government functionaries than are appeals by human rights groups.

Citizens continue to demand government help in fighting cybercrime, defending children from stalkers and bullies, and protecting consumers.

If you want to have traction in China, you have to be in China.

One-way monologues through the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia don’t have much street cred with China’s Internet generation, to be honest.

The Internet is an empowering force for people who are protesting against the abuse of power.

There’s a real contradiction that’s difficult to explain to the West and the outside world about China and about the Internet.

We willingly share personal information with companies for the convenience of using their products.

The fact of the matter is that fewer people in Tokyo are able to do business in English than in many other big Asian cities, like Shanghai, Seoul or Bangkok.

Increasingly, people have very little tolerance for anything that smacks of propaganda.

The Chinese government clearly sees Internet and mobile innovation as a major driver of its global economic competitiveness going forward.

Over the past several decades, a growing number of investors have been choosing to put their money in funds that screen companies for their environmental and labor records. Some socially responsible investors are starting to add free expression and privacy to their list of criteria.

I study how governments seek to stifle and control online dissent.

Only about 10 percent of India‘s population uses the web, making it unlikely that Internet freedom will be a decisive ballot-box issue anytime soon.

As a citizen of a community, if you never vote or engage, don’t be surprised when the outcome doesn’t serve your interests; you’ve never done anything to push things in the right direction.

Pretty much anybody who does creative work in China navigates the gray zone. People aren’t clear about where the line is any more, beyond which life gets really nasty and you become a dissident without having intended ever to be one.

If multi-stakeholder Internet governance is to survive an endless series of challenges, its champions must commit to serving the interests and protecting the rights of all Internet users around the world, particularly those in developing countries where Internet use is growing fastest.

President Barack Obama’s administration sometimes finds itself at odds with members of Congress who oppose nearly everything the United Nations does on principle.

It’s a tough problem that a company faces once they branch out beyond one set of offices in California into that big bad world out there.

There is respect for law, and then there is complicity in lawlessness.

Every year in China, Internet executives are officially rewarded for their ‘patriotism.’

Nobody is forcing anybody who is uncomfortable with the terms of service to use Facebook. Executives point out that Internet users have choices on the Web.

I haven‘t heard of any cases of anti-American blog posts being censored or bloggers encountering consequences for anti-American speech on the web in China.

There isn’t much question that the person who obtained the WikiLeaks cables from a classified U.S. government network broke U.S. law and should expect to face the consequences. The legal rights of a website that publishes material acquired from that person, however, are much more controversial.

We have to start thinking of ourselves as citizens of the Internet, not just passive users. I don’t see how we can bring about change in our digital lives if we don’t take responsibility.

Human rights in cyberspace are really no different from rights in the physical world.

The Patriot Act, passed overwhelmingly but hastily after 9/11, allows the FBI to obtain telecommunication, financial, and credit records without a court order.

The Internet is empowering everybody. It’s empowering Democrats. It’s empowering dictators. It’s empowering criminals. It’s empowering people who are doing really wonderful and creative things.

There’s a lot of politics over who gets the next allocation of Congressional funding.

In China, Vietnam, Russia and several former Soviet states, the dominant social networks are run by local companies whose relationship with the government actually constrains the empowering potential of social networks.

QQ is not secure. You might as well be sharing your information with the Public Security Bureau.

It is time to stop debating whether the Internet is an effective tool for political expression and instead to address the much more urgent question of how digital technology can be structured, governed, and used to maximize the good and minimize the evil.

Facebook is blocked in mainland China, but is used heavily by the rest of the Chinese-speaking world, including Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan.

The better-informed we are, the more we can do to make sure what’s happening is in our interests and is accountable to us.

The trend in China is toward tighter and tighter control. They are basically improving their censorship mechanisms.

The Tunisian blogger and activist Sami Ben Gharbia has written passionately about how U.S. government involvement in grassroots digital spaces can endanger those who are already vulnerable to accusations by nasty regimes of acting as foreign agents.

Sohu will protect you from yourself.

Freedom only remains healthy if we think about the implications of what we do on a day-to-day basis.

Activists from the Middle East to Asia to the former Soviet states have all been telling me that they suffer from increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks.

Human freedom increasingly depends on who controls what we know and, therefore, how we understand our world. It depends on what information we are able to create and disseminate: what we can share, how we can share it, and with whom we can share it.

It’s time to take decisive action to stop American and other multinationals from aiding and abetting the wrong side in the global digital arms race.

While the federal government is required by law to document publicly its wiretapping of phone lines, it is not required to do so with Internet communications.

Like Syria, the government of Bahrain employs aggressive tactics to censor and monitor its people’s online activity.

Whether or not Americans supported George W. Bush, they could not avoid learning about Abu Ghraib.

In the wake of the Internet getting shut down in Egypt – something that also happened in Xinjiang – I know that there are groups working on ways to help people get online when domestic networks get shut down. This could also be of use to some people in China.

During the 1980s, when Japan’s economy was roaring and people were writing books with titles like ‘Japan is Number One,’ most Japanese college students didn’t make the effort to become fluent in English.

Microsoft, Yahoo and others are helping to institutionalize and legitimize the integration of censorship into the global IT business model.

If China can’t even given LinkedIn enough breathing room to operate in China, that would be a very unfortunate signal for a government to send its professionals about its priorities.

China’s censorship and propaganda systems may be complex and multilayered, but they are obviously not well coordinated.

There are a lot of people that think the Internet is going to bring information and democracy and pluralism in China just by existing.

Clear limits should be set on how power is exercised in cyberspace by companies as well as governments through the democratic political process and enforced through law.

Shibuya is a trendy part of Tokyo where young people come to meet and have a good time.

Without global human rights, labor and environmental movements, companies would still be hiring 12-year-olds as a matter of course and poisoning our groundwater without batting an eyelid.

It is not inevitable that the Internet will evolve in a manner compatible with democracy.

Yahoo! had a choice. It chose to provide an e-mail service hosted on servers based inside China, making itself subject to Chinese legal jurisdiction. It didn’t have to do that. It could have provided a service hosted offshore only.

You don’t have to be a nerd or a programmer or a network engineer to make a difference.

If they lose their legal basis for owning a .cn domain, google.cn would cease to exist, or if it continued to exist, it would be illegal, and doing anything blatantly illegal in China puts their employees at serious risk.

In China’s big cities, American products – say, for instance, Proctor and Gamble shampoos or many other goods – are widely coveted by a lot of Chinese consumers.

‘Intermediary liability’ means that the intermediary, a service that acts as ‘intermediate‘ conduit for the transmission or publication of information, is held liable or legally responsible for everything its users do.

It takes a strong stomach and a thick skin to be a female activist fighting online censorship in Pakistan.

The Internet is a politically contested space.

I lived in China for 9 years straight. I saw how my Chinese friends benefited and gained much more freedom to determine the course of their lives, their jobs, their creative works, and their identities over the course of a decade. Much of this increased freedom is thanks to economic engagement by the West.

The critical question is: How do we ensure that the Internet develops in a way that is compatible with democracy?

I am well aware of the facts presented by numerous security experts on the many ways in which the United States‘ digital networks have come under siege by cybercriminals and under daily assault by hackers in league with various foreign governments.