Beat me again I consider it an honor to be even close to Rebecca in posting but she beat me to this despite it having been in my mailbox for most of a week. I wanted to devote some time to it, now all my thunder has been stolen. Yeah right; this issue points to why what is happening on the Chinese portion of the net will effect us globally. There's plenty of thunder to go around, we need some lightning.

I agree with Rebecca that governments should stay away from any regulation of the internet. But I would like to see the United States guard the best interests of intellectual freedom. It benefits the citizens of our country when they and others have full access to the intellectual wealth of the internet. It is easy to see where this could have global importance in the areas of health and environmental issues.

I like the idea of citizens organizing to show their concern. I also don't see this as having much weight unless it can be translated into economic pressure: Most likely coercive pressure. So far Yahoo has escaped our valiant effort to bring them around on the issue of intellectual freedom. I would like to see the government of the United States work in the interests of the citizens by bringing that pressure through an effective though noninvasive means. Companies should be as free as possible to conduct their business: I still hold to a notion that there is a strong relationship between economic and political freedom.

Our government can take the moral high ground, that it so often aspires to, on this. If companies want to do business with tyrants and despots, fine. They just won't be doing business with the government of the United States.

Google, the fine folks that host this blog, are also running dogs of the counter-revolutionaries.  ¶ 1/08/2006 07:38:00 PM