Sohu will protect you from yourself.
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.
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.
Would the Protestant Reformation have happened without the printing press? Would the American Revolution have happened without pamphlets? Probably not. But neither printing presses nor pamphlets were the heroes of reform and revolution.
We like to think of the Internet as a border-busting technology.
Governments clash with each other over who should control the co-ordination of the Internet's infrastructure and critical resources.
Normalization of U.S.-China relations in 1979, combined with economic reforms and opening, transformed the Chinese people's lives.
Digital activism did not spring immaculately out of Twitter and Facebook. It's been going on ever since blogs existed.
Citizens continue to demand government help in fighting cybercrime, defending children from stalkers and bullies, and protecting consumers.
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.
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.
There is no country on Earth where Internet and telecommunications companies do not face at least some pressure from governments to do things that would potentially infringe on users' rights to free expression and privacy.
In the United States, whatever you may think of Julian Assange, even people who are not necessarily big fans of his are very concerned about the way in which the United States government and some companies have handled Wikileaks.
There's a lot of politics over who gets the next allocation of Congressional funding.
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.
Compliance with the Stop Online Piracy Act would require huge overhead spending by Internet companies for staff and technologies dedicated to monitoring users and censoring any infringing material from being posted or transmitted.
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.
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.
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.
We're going to get the Internet we deserve, and those people who are the most active in shaping the Internet to their liking are going to win out.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anything illegal under Chinese law is, of course, not protected by copyright.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
For centuries, the Yangtze River - the longest in Asia - has played an important role in China's history, culture, and economy. The Yangtze is as quintessentially Chinese as the Nile is Egyptian or the Rhine is German. Many businesses use its name.
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.
While sanctions against Iran and Syria are intended to constrain those countries' governments, they have had the unfortunate side effect of constraining activists' access to free online software and services used widely across the Middle East, including browsers, online chat applications, and online storage services.
President Barack Obama's administration sometimes finds itself at odds with members of Congress who oppose nearly everything the United Nations does on principle.
Defending a free and open global Internet requires a broad-based global movement with the stamina to engage in endless - and often highly technical - national and international policy battles.
In the Internet age, it is inevitable that corporations and government agencies will have access to detailed information about people's lives.
Internet freedom is not possible without freedom from fear, and users will not be free from fear unless they are sufficiently protected from online theft and attack.
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.
Speech within the kingdom of Amazonia - run by its sovereign Jeff Bezos and his board of directors with help from the wise counsel and judgment of the company's executives - is not protected in the same way that speech is constitutionally protected in America's public spaces.
If you want to have traction in China, you have to be in China.
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.
Governance is a way of organizing, amplifying, and constraining power.
Seemingly small choices and small actions add up over time.
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.
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.
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.
Increasingly, people have very little tolerance for anything that smacks of propaganda.
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.
