Rebecca MacKinnon

"If they lose their legal basis for owning a .cn domain, google.cn would cease to exist, or if it continued to exist, it would be illegal, and doing anything blatantly illegal in China puts their employees at serious risk."

"It took a generation for companies to recognise their responsibilities in terms of labour practices and another generation for them to recognise their environmental obligations."

"Over the past several decades, a growing number of investors have been choosing to put their money in funds that screen companies for their environmental and labor records. Some socially responsible investors are starting to add free expression and privacy to their list of criteria."

"Over time, if you want rights, you have to also show that you can use them responsibly and that you can build a positive world in the online space, and that's also very important."

"Thanks to the Internet in general and social media in particular, the Chinese people now have a mechanism to hold authorities accountable for wrongdoing - at least sometimes - without any actual political or legal reforms having taken place. Major political power struggles and scandals are no longer kept within elite circles."

"The Internet is a politically contested space."

"The Internet is an empowering force for people who are protesting against the abuse of power."

"There is respect for law, and then there is complicity in lawlessness."

"There isn't much question that the person who obtained the WikiLeaks cables from a classified U.S. government network broke U.S. law and should expect to face the consequences. The legal rights of a website that publishes material acquired from that person, however, are much more controversial."

"To have a .cn domain, you have to be a registered business. You have to prove your site is legal."

"Whether or not Americans supported George W. Bush, they could not avoid learning about Abu Ghraib."

"Without global human rights, labor and environmental movements, companies would still be hiring 12-year-olds as a matter of course and poisoning our groundwater without batting an eyelid."

"Yahoo! had a choice. It chose to provide an e-mail service hosted on servers based inside China, making itself subject to Chinese legal jurisdiction. It didn't have to do that. It could have provided a service hosted offshore only."