Google State Department

For Internet companies,that choice has been sharpened by the fact that the World Wide Web is no longer just a force for freedom and diversity but also a tool for repression. This change happened so fast that it left the foreign policy establishment gasping to catch up. It also exposed Washingtons deep ambivalence about information technology: while it champions the free flow of ideas in closed societies like Iran,it fears being a target for cyber-attacks by hostile governments and doesnt want to export technology that could be diverted into military uses.

What forces Google to have a foreign policy is that what theyre exporting isnt a product or a service,its a freedom, said Clay Shirky,who teaches at New York University and writes about the Internets social effects. For Google,the sinister side of Chinas cyber policy eventually came to outweigh the economic attraction of Chinas market.

The choice was not easy. Since late 2006,when it entered China,Google argued that a censored search service was better than no search service at all. But after it discovered that its network had been hacked from inside China,and that the Gmail accounts of human rights activists had been infiltrated,that trade-off no longer seemed defensible.

As if on cue,the Obama administration made its first major statement on Internet freedom. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the Internet could be a force for good or ill and encouraged governments to use it for good,while urging American companies not to knuckle under to censorship. But she left the work of navigating restrictions to the companies.

That navigation gets harder by the day,said Mark Palmer,a former US ambassador to Hungary who has started independent TV stations in Eastern Europe. There are more than 40 countries that restrict the Internet, he said. The State Department and the Treasury Department have not come to grips with it.

The Treasury did recently begin allowing firms to export free online services like instant messaging,chat and photo sharing to Iran,Sudan,and Cuba. Having watched the impetus that Twitter and Facebook gave to anti-government protests in Tehran,the administration wanted more of it. But the difficult-to-jam high-speed satellite Internet service that Irans dissidents also crave remains unavailable because of sanctions intended to retard Irans nuclear programme.

The State Department is encouraging the development of technologies that enable users to circumvent restrictions on the Internet. But advocates for some startups said that the government had not allotted enough money or steered support to the most promising ventures. And the US lacks a uniform policy for dealing with American companies that export software that governments can use to filter the Internet.

Googles problems are not just with repressive regimes. Last month,an Italian court convicted Googles chief legal officer,David Drummond,and two colleagues of breaking privacy laws after a video of an autistic boy being bullied was posted on Googles network.

Googles showdown with Beijing,analysts said,is driven in part by its fear of similar lawsuits from China. Google also wants the US to treat Internet censorship as a trade barrier that influences decisions on foreign aid.

Not all tech companies share Googles fervour. Microsoft remains in China,running a government-censored search engine. Its founder,Bill Gates,said that companies needed to decide if they are going to obey the rules of the countries in which they operate,although Microsoft says that it,too,pushes back.

Shirky says he sees a generational divide. Its no accident, he said,that Microsoft was founded during the cold war while Google was founded after the cold war. While Microsoft has a mentality in which national sovereignty still trumps ethical arguments,he said,Google is trying to balance the rights of sovereignty against its own evolving set of values.