In modern politics, even the leader of the free world needs help from the sultan of Facebookistan.
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.
There is respect for law, and then there is complicity in lawlessness.
We must all rise to the challenge to demonstrate that security and prosperity in the Internet age are not only compatible with liberty, they ultimately depend on it.
Whether or not Americans supported George W. Bush, they could not avoid learning about Abu Ghraib.
The Internet is an empowering force for people who are protesting against the abuse of power.
Governance is a way of organizing, amplifying, and constraining power.
Over time, if you want rights, you have to also show that you can use them responsibly and that you can build a positive world in the online space, and that’s also very important.
Every year in China, Internet executives are officially rewarded for their ‘patriotism.’
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.
Public trust in both government and corporations is low, and deservedly so.
The potential for the abuse of power through digital networks – upon which we the people now depend for nearly everything, including our politics – is one of the most insidious threats to democracy in the Internet age.
When Tim Berners-Lee invented the computer code that led to the creation of the World Wide Web in 1990, he did not try to patent or charge fees for the use of his technology.
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.
Can companies just claim a total lack of political responsibility in how their technology is used in all instances? It’s something that companies should be thinking about when they sell their technologies around the world.
If China someday gains a more fair, just, and accountable system of government, it will be due to the hard work and efforts of the Chinese people, not due to the inexorable workings of any particular technology.
We like to think of the Internet as a border-busting technology.
As it turns out, American-made technology had helped Mubarak and his security state collect, compile, and parse vast amounts of data about everyday citizens.
Like it or not, Google and the Chinese government are stuck in a tense, long-term relationship, and can look forward to more high-stakes shadow-boxing in the netherworld of the world’s most elaborate system of censorship.
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.
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.
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.
To have a .cn domain, you have to be a registered business. You have to prove your site is legal.
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.
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.