Quote Originally Posted by TomOfSweden View Post
China and Iran are good examples. Information sharing is out of control and it doesn't seem to have any impact.
I don't know if that's true or not. Certainly it doesn't seem to have had a significant impact as yet, but in a repressive society that will take much longer than in a free society. As long as the information is out there, though, it will have an effect.

You may recall several years ago when many people were angry about Google, or Yahoo perhaps, agreeing to censor their search engines for the Chinese government. Most people felt that caving in to censorship like that would do more harm than good. But my feeling was, and is, that once the search engines are in place, the students and intellectuals will find a way to get around the censorship. And that will open up a whole can of worms for the Chinese government. A free education system and a free exchange of information are the biggest enemy of a repressive government. Once people learn about the lies their leaders have been feeding them they will demand change.