Secretary Clinton’s remarks will always strike a chord for 21st Century Statecraft and open Internet initiatives... Let’s not forget the digital uprisings that came as a result of the SOPA/PIPA protests in the United States earlier this year, topped off with the shut down of Wikipedia and Reddit among others.

American diplomats are making progress in heading off possible international proposals to increase Internet regulation by the United Nations, a top State Department official told a House subcommittee on Thursday. A range of American lawmakers, businesses, and nonprofit organizations fear that some countries will try to use negotiations over international telecommunications treaties in December to expand the authority of the International Telecommunication Union, the U.N. organization that has historically overseen international telecom policies.

This week the China-watching twitterverse was surprised to discover that Hu Xijin, the editor of the Global Times, was now tweeting. That the editor of the Global Times, an “angry government mouthpiece” that supports China’s policy of Internet censorship...

Another reason why the United States government tries its level best to ensure a free Internet is because it serves its foreign policy goals with respect to public diplomacy and outreach at very minimal cost. Internet-enabled protest movements are bringing down undemocratic governments faster

India prides itself on being the “free” rising Asian giant. Some Indian policymakers may have watched China’s extraordinary economic rise in recent years with a little envy. But the social clampdown is presumably not what most Indians want as they seek to emulate some of the success of their massive neighbor.

This is part of a larger international cyber diplomacy effort, that the State Department is undertaking that’s weaving all of these different aspects of cyberspace together, and that includes everything from...internet freedom, to economic issues and governance issues on the internet, to cyber security issues...this basket of issues is now a foreign policy imperative or a foreign policy priority.