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.

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.

Professional camera crews are rarely there when a bomb goes off or a rocket lands. They usually show up afterwards.

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.

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

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

Ronald Reagan, when he was campaigning for President, said that he would break relations with Communist China and re-establish diplomatic relations with Taiwan. But when he got into office, he pursued a very different policy of engagement with China and of increasing trade and business ties with China.

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

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

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.

Public trust in both government and corporations is low, and deservedly so.

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

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.

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.

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.

Nothing ever goes as planned in China.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Sohu will protect you from yourself.

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

China is building a model for how an authoritarian government can survive the Internet.

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

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

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.

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

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

There is a widening gap between the middle-aged-to-older generation, who still read newspapers and watch CCTV news, and the Internet generation.

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

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

There has been a rising tide of criticism about China's treatment of foreign companies.

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.

Tactically, yelling at Google is unwise.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Companies have choices to make about what extent they're handling their users' content.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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