The internet, Facebook and Twitter have created mass communications and social spaces that regimes cannot control.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
While the Internet can't be controlled 100 percent, it's possible for governments to filter content and discourage people from organizing.
One of the things that amazes me about Twitter is the way it utterly eradicates artificial barriers to communication. Things like status, geopolitics and so on keep people from talking to one another. Those go away in Twitter. You see exchanges that would never happen anywhere else.
The Internet is so big that no one can control anything, really.
Dictators aren't stupid, or regimes could be toppled easily by young people mobilizing on Facebook.
Countries that have the Internet already are not going to turn it off. And so the power of freedom, the power of ideas will spread, and it will change those societies in very dramatic ways.
A utopian future for the Internet could be secured if the heavy-duty influencers - and the grassroots influencers tweeting along - can create a new global organization peopled with defenders of Internet freedom.
Several authoritarian regimes reportedly propose to ban anonymity from the web, making it easier to find and arrest dissidents. At Google, we see and feel the dangers of the government-led net crackdown. We operate in about 150 countries around the globe.
History is rife with examples of governments taking actions to 'protect' their citizens from harm by controlling access to information and inhibiting freedom of expression and other freedoms outlined in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We must make sure, collectively, that the Internet avoids a similar fate.
The decentralized nature of online conversations often makes it easier to manipulate public opinion, both domestically and globally. Regimes that once relied on centralized systems of media control can now deliver ideological messages more subtly, with the help of little-known intermediaries like anonymous commenters on websites.
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.