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.
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.
There's a lot of politics over who gets the next allocation of Congressional funding.
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.
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.
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.
Authoritarian systems evolve. Authoritarianism in the Internet Age is not your old Cold War authoritarianism.
Like Syria, the government of Bahrain employs aggressive tactics to censor and monitor its people's online activity.
The U.S. relationship with Bahrain is obviously more complicated than with Syria and Iran.
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.
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.
When U.S. commercial interests press the Chinese government to do a better job of policing Chinese websites for pirated content, a blind eye is generally turned to the fact that ensuing crackdowns provide a great excuse to tighten mechanisms to censor all content the Chinese government doesn't like.
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.
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.
Consistently, Baidu has censored politically sensitive search results much more thoroughly than Google.cn.
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.
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.
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 is not a physical country, but with 900 million users, its 'population' comes third after China and India. It may not be able to tax or jail its inhabitants, but its executives, programmers, and engineers do exercise a form of governance over people's online activities and identities.
