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.
— Rebecca MacKinnon
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.
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.
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.
Google attempted to run a search engine in China, and they ended up giving up.
Authoritarian systems evolve. Authoritarianism in the Internet Age is not your old Cold War authoritarianism.
It would be normal for anybody running a high-profile, politically controversial operation in China to anticipate worst-case scenario, and to do everything possible to guard against them.
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.
There has been a rising tide of criticism about China's treatment of foreign companies.
QQ is not secure. You might as well be sharing your information with the Public Security Bureau.
Consistently, Baidu has censored politically sensitive search results much more thoroughly than Google.cn.
Clearly Google is searching for a way to do business in China that avoids them sending someone to jail over an e-mail.
The Chinese government clearly sees Internet and mobile innovation as a major driver of its global economic competitiveness going forward.
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.
If high-tech companies are serious about doing the right thing, they can join together and lobby for more transparency and accountability in the way in which Chinese officialdom deals with Internet services.
Nothing ever goes as planned in China.
There are a lot of people that think the Internet is going to bring information and democracy and pluralism in China just by existing.
Internet freedom is a bit of a Rorschach test: it means different things to different people.
A lot of Chinese don't understand why people in the West are critical of China.
I don't think any foreign Internet company can effectively compete against Chinese companies in the Chinese market. The regulatory environment is so difficult that it's almost impossible for foreigners to have an advantage over locals who have better political connections and who can manipulate the regulatory system much more effectively.
In China, the problem is that with the system of censorship that's now in place, the user doesn't know to what extent, why, and under what authority there's been censorship. There's no way of appealing. There's no due process.
Freedom only remains healthy if we think about the implications of what we do on a day-to-day basis.
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.
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.
Tactically, yelling at Google is unwise.
Facebook has a rule that you're not supposed to be anonymous.
There is a widening gap between the middle-aged-to-older generation, who still read newspapers and watch CCTV news, and the Internet generation.
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 Olympics brought a lot of development to Beijing, but I don't see that there have been any changes to human rights as a result of the Olympics.
Sohu will protect you from yourself.
To have a .cn domain, you have to be a registered business. You have to prove your site is legal.
The trend in China is toward tighter and tighter control. They are basically improving their censorship mechanisms.
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.
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.
I don't think there's any serious discussion inside the Chinese government about liberalising. I don't think anything's going to change in China until enough Chinese say, 'We're not going to play this game any more.'
While the Internet can't be controlled 100 percent, it's possible for governments to filter content and discourage people from organizing.
The early idealists and companies and governments have all assumed that the Internet will bring freedom. Yet China proves that this is not the case.
The user in China wants the same thing that any Internet user wants - privacy in conversations, maximum access to information, and the ability to speak their minds online.
Companies have choices to make about what extent they're handling their users' content.
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.
Google's entire business model and its planning for the future are banking on an open and free Internet. And it will not succeed if the Internet becomes overly balkanized.
Twitter is growing up, expanding into other countries, and recognizing that the Internet is contrary to what people hoped; the government does reach into the Internet.
When Google went into China, there were some people who said they shouldn't compromise at all - that it is very bad for human rights to do so. But there were other people, particularly Chinese people, who said they were glad Google had gone in.
Increasingly, people have very little tolerance for anything that smacks of propaganda.
There's a lot of politics over who gets the next allocation of Congressional funding.
China is building a model for how an authoritarian government can survive the Internet.
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's a real contradiction that's difficult to explain to the West and the outside world about China and about the Internet.
If you just technically adhere to the law, sometimes that's enough, sometimes it's not; it's really hard to predict. There is definitely a possibility that the Chinese authorities won't find it sufficient.
