Evgeny Morozov Quotes

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.

Even a government as ostensibly open and committed to freedom of speech as our own — are [censors] more likely to operate in their own interests than in their citizens’. In the age of cyberspace, that is a scary prospect.

As long as a government can come and shoot you, you can't jump on the Internet to freedom.

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.

I think we should not control the Internet.

The Internet has been seen in the West as the quintessential expression of the free exchange of ideas and information, untrammeled by government interference and increasingly global in reach. But the Chinese government has shown that the Internet can be successfully filtered and controlled.

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.

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

While the Internet can't be controlled 100 percent, it's possible for governments to filter content and discourage people from organizing.

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

To uphold state security China like many other countries of the world has placed some restrictions on the Internet to protect the freedom of the majority of the people.

We now expect Google, Facebook, Twitter and other companies to police the Internet for dangerous and illegal material - violent, terrorist, criminal - and some democratic governments require them to do so. But what if they did decide to repress material for political reasons? How would we know?

Political oppositionary activity on the Russian Internet caused the government to pass laws limiting both service operators and users. As a result, the Russian tech environment became much less liberal, losing freedom as one of its competitive advantages.

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.

Even with censorship, the Internet is a force for change.

Countries like Iran and China support an Internet Iron Curtain that would censor political dissidents and deny anonymous activity online through mandatory registrations of IP addresses.

Let me start with Yahoo. As we meet today, a Chinese citizen who had the courage to speak his mind on the Internet is in prison because Yahoo chose to share his name and address with the Chinese Government.

Google has withdrawn from China, arguing that it is no longer willing to design its search engine to block information that the Chinese government does not wish its citizens to have. In liberal democracies around the world, this decision has generally been greeted with enthusiasm.

There are a lot of people that think the Internet is going to bring information and democracy and pluralism in China just by existing.

I study how governments seek to stifle and control online dissent.

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.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo should be developing new technologies to bypass government sensors and barriers to the Internet; but instead, they agreed to guard the gates themselves.

In Russia, they do not generally block the Internet and directly censor websites.

Today it is becoming harder to speak out, with the inception of the Patriot Act, the president has legislated free speech to be a crime.

The Internet is uncontrollable. And if the Internet is uncontrollable, freedom will win. It’s as simple as that