Digital Freedom Quotes

Google will be obliged either to accept Chinese regulations or exit the world's largest Internet market, with serious consequences for its long-term global ambitions. This is a metaphor for our times: America's most dynamic company cannot take on the Chinese government - even on an issue like free and open information - and win.

I think the whole world has been able to utilize the Internet. I feel like you don't have to be from a certain soil.

After Secretary Clinton announced in January 2010 that Internet freedom would be a major pillar of U.S. foreign policy, the State Department decided to take what Clinton calls a 'venture capital' approach to the funding of tools, research, public information projects, and training.

Once I found out that people were really making careers for themselves off the Internet, independently, I was really inspired.

Disclosure and transparency are the currency of the Internet, and they are at odds with authoritarianism.

The global threat of 'Big Brother' can actually be conquered purely by technology.

The early cyberpunk idea was that networked computers would let us do our work at home, as freelancers, and then transact directly with peers over networks. Digital technology would create tremendous slack, allow us to apply its asynchronous, decentralized qualities to our own work and lives.

To have the choice between proprietary software packages, is being able to choose your master. Freedom means not having a master. And in the area of computing, freedom means not using proprietary software.

From day one, the Internet was a public square, and the providers merely connected everyone, rather than regulating who spoke with whom. That allowed the Internet to evolve into a form of basic infrastructure, used by over a billion people today.

We recognized from the beginning that we could create profiles for the bands and allow people to use the site any way they wanted to. We didn't stop people from promoting whatever they wanted to promote on MySpace.

For me, open source is a moral thing.

The net's future is far from assured, and history offers much warning. Within a few decades of Gutenberg's creation, princes and priests moved to restrict the right to print books.

A free and open Internet is a despot's worst enemy.

The quintessential exercise of free speech in a culture supposedly built on that concept and dedicated to it, the Internet's development is as historically important to humanity perhaps even more so as Gutenberg 's invention of the printing press.

Information on the Internet must be as free as in the newspapers.

The only hope we have is the Internet. We must strive to keep it free.

The Internet is truly God's gift to the Chinese people.

There was one issue on which there seemed to be almost unanimity: the Internet should not be managed by any government, national or multinational.

On the social media front, governments may attempt to monitor and repress citizens’ postings or discredit incriminating reports with misinformation, but such efforts buck technological trends that are empowering consumers, such as strong encryption.

The fact that we don't have censorship on the Internet really gives you a lot of freedom, as makers and creative people do what they believe in.

The federal government seeks to control and regulate the Internet, but the last thing this Congress should be doing is trying to stifle public debate online.

We've seen a massive attack on the freedom of the web. Governments are realizing the power of this medium to organize people and they are trying to clamp down across the world, not just in places like China and North Korea; we're seeing bills in the United States, in Italy, all across the world.

Elon Musk isn’t everyone’s idea of a hero, but in wresting Twitter from the grip of the Maoists who dominate our culture, he made a small but significant contribution to our public discourse.

It's very difficult for governments to dominate the Internet because it's so difficult to control. People want to be free. People want to hear multiple voices. They want to make their own decisions. And people who see things will report things.

The Internet's distinct configuration may have made cyberattacks easy to launch, but it has also kindled the flame of freedom.