For the last month and a half I have been following the Ukraine crisis on my Twitter account, and it has offered an unprecedented way to get a real understanding of what people think about the situation and how they think it should be resolved. 

Earlier this month, the US Commerce Department announced a plan to back away from its last direct involvement in running the Internet. The man who made that decision, Lawrence Strickling, sees the government's role today as merely "clerical," but letting go of even that sends an important symbolic message: The Internet is all grown up now.

Tom Cochran, the Chief Technology Officer at Atlantic Media and the former Director of New Media Technologies at the White House, is joining the State Department on Monday to take the lessons of the Obama campaign and apply them to American foreign policy around the globe.

So held federal District Judge Jesse Furman in Manhattan in yesterday’s Zhang v. Baidu, Inc. An excerpt (one paragraph break added): In this suit, a group of New York residents who advocate for increased democracy in China sue one of China’s largest companies, Baidu, Inc…. Plaintiffs contend that Baidu, which operates an Internet search engine akin to Google, unlawfully blocks from its search results here in the United States articles and other information concerning “the Democracy movement in China” and related topics.

“The best possible birthday gift for Brazilian and global web users” is how Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the world wide web, which turned 25 this month, described Brazil’s “internet bill of rights” in an open letter on March 24th. The next day legislators in the lower house of Congress duly approved it.

More than just politicians and diplomats using Twitter and Facebook, digital diplomacy allows countries to project their power beyond their borders. However the fledgling field is already experiencing a crisis of credibility in the wake of the NSA scandal, writes Antony Funnell.

Developing nations want the Internet to be free from censorship, and nowhere is this more prevalent than in Latin America. A new Pew Research Center survey reveals that six of the ten countries that feel the strongest about people having access to the Internet without government censorship hail from Latin America.

The Russian embassy in London has warned the "British side should mind its language" following a tweet yesterday by the UK embassy in Moscow on Russia's annexation of the Crimea region in Ukraine.