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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.

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

It seems pretty clear that the Internet has an important economic role to play for China as it reaches out to the rest of the world.

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.

Experience has shown us that attempts to control the Internet will invariably fail. We should be instructed by the failed efforts of China to regulate political content, the efforts of America to regulate Internet gambling, or the efforts of Australia to regulate certain speech. By its very nature, the Internet will always resist such controls.

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.

Today's China is not in the least shut out from the rest of the world. Trends come to us from all over the world. And the Internet is really developed in China. We get news from all over the world.

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

The Internet was invented in America but has found its largest number of users in China.