Basically, the argument goes like this: Since the protestors in Egypt organized and collaborated via Facebook and Twitter against a government that didn’t understand the tools, companies that don’t embrace social enterprise and collaboration tools like Chatter will wind up like Mubarak — overthrown, or rather defeated by their competitors.

Yes it’s a stretch, but you certainly can’t fault Benioff on the passion and enthusiasm of his delivery. And since it’s a Salesforce.com event — Cloudforce New York — there’s no one to yank him off the stage.

There will also be news. Benioff will talk about a new mission for Radian6, the social media monitoring outfit that Salesforce acquired in March for $326 million. Expect to hear him talk about the “social marketing cloud” quite a bit.

What does that mean? Radian6 will be getting some new features around engaging and messaging sales leads and contacts on Facebook and Twitter and Web forums, and so on. It will have some powerful tools for filtering all the junk that people post and look for places where people are expressing clear sentiment or intent to buy, asking for guidance, or maybe looking for a deal.

In an example Salesforce showed me in a demo yesterday, if someone is looking for an online stock broker and asks their Twitter friends for a recommendation or about a specific broker they’re thinking of, that company’s social media team will see the message, classify it as a sales lead, and can reach out with special offers. The same thing goes for customer service messages. When someone is unhappy about something — say, their cable service — those posts can be automatically assigned to the right person for a follow-up, a special offer, or whatever the case may be.

People so often turn to Twitter and Facebook to give feedback or to express outrage about products these days, and companies are still figuring out how to respond and work with those platforms. It’s all about protecting brands.

Benioff’s talk takes place against the backdrop of a lot of uncertainty around Salesforce’s share price, valuation and growth prospects. Salesforce stock has been slapped around a bit following an earnings report that analysts didn’t exactly love, yet you can’t deny its revenue growth rates are impressive: Salesforce is on its way to being a $3 billion company next year.

The problem with Salesforce is how the market should calibrate its valuation. The shares have traded as high as $160 and as low as $109 this year, and closed yesterday at $110.58. Premarket sentiment this morning shows Salesforce stock headed up about 3 percent as of 8:08 am ET. Some people — namely hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson — have argued that Salesforce is fairly valued at about 75 percent lower than where it’s trading now. Expect Benioff’s comments today to give the shares a lift. But given how volatile the shares have been, don’t expect it to last.

Snip.it is functionally very similar to a bookmarking service like Delicious, allowing users to share pages through a browser bookmarklet and group them in thematic connections. Other users can then subscribe to those collections.

Start-ups like Tumblr and Pinterest thrive in part because users can express themselves through content that other people have posted. Often it’s far easier to pin or reblog a photo or quote than to compose a blog post or a pithy tweet. Snip.it hopes to extend that kind of activity to sharing news stories and other content accompanied by a line or two of opinion from the poster.

Snip.it launches an invitation-only beta today and should be open to the public in about a month. At this point it requires a Facebook account to register.

The company is funded by Khosla Ventures (where Adeeb was formerly a principal), True Ventures, Charles River Ventures and SV Angel.

There are three big announcements coming in Benioff’s remarks, and they’re all connected to Chatter, the social enterprise service that Salesforce promoted in a pair of TV ads that aired during the Super Bowl; Chatter will appear as part of the next upgrade to Salesforce.com, called Winter ’12. The whole idea is to deliver a Facebook- or Twitter-like experience that supplants traditional collaboration methods like email and meetings. Salesforce says its clients who use Chatter are seeing email volume decline by 30 percent; meetings decline by 27 percent.

The first is Chatter Now, which will deliver real-time collaboration within Chatter itself. You’ll be able to see if your colleagues are signed in and available in real time — kinda like on AOL instant messenger or Skype — and you’ll be able to chat and share your screen without leaving your Chatter feed.

The second is Chatter Customer Groups. You don’t need to collaborate just internally, but also with people you do business with. You’ll be able to invite people from outside your company into your Chatter network, and can set rules on what they’re allowed to see and do.

Third is Chatter Connect, which is intended to entice software developers to work Chatter into other enterprise applications — many people think this is where the real action is in the social enterprise field. Ask the soon-to-be-public Jive Software, which can add social features to, among other applications, Microsoft Office. There’s also Yammer, which grabs social feeds from any application that has them, including, uh, Chatter. It’s not the newest idea under the sun, but Salesforce is off to a respectable start: Its first conquest is Microsoft’s collaboration software, SharePoint.

Finally, Benioff will talk about mobile devices. He’s a big fan of Apple’s iPad and has regularly talked about its popularity among enterprise customers. And while Salesforce.com has been available as a dedicated app through the iTunes App store for some time now, it’s about to get a lot more flexible through the iPad browser. Salesforce will announce touch.salesforce.com, which it says will bring the power of HTML5 to enterprise applications.

If HTML5 doesn’t mean anything to you, then you missed one of the more significant controversies about Apple’s iOS devices. They don’t support Adobe Flash, because Apple argues that Flash — which is used widely for Web video and animation — is clunky on mobile devices and drains batteries too fast. When it comes to multimedia and rich experiences on the Web, Apple prefers HTML. So touch.salesforce.com will be the place where users of iPads, iPhones and scores of other mobile devices will be able to go and get an experience that’s geared to their device without having to compromise on the Salesforce features they’re accustomed to on their desktops. Additionally, developers will be able to build their own apps, and all 220,000 apps built using Salesforce’s Force.com development platform will work with HTML5, as well.

That’s an awful lot for one CEO to talk about, and Benioff is a busy man. But, as in the past, he’s not too busy to give TV interviews that coincide with the Dreamforce conference. While he’s regularly found on CNBC’s “Mad Money,” on Monday he showed up on Bloomberg West for a chat with Emily Chang.

The highlight comes early in the interview, when Benioff links the Arab Spring — which has been propelled in part by Facebook- and Twitter-using protesters who have toppled a couple of dictators, most notably Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and now apparently Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Companies are falling, too, Benioff says, but they have a fighting chance to survive if they get a little more social. Get it? Chang, to her credit, doesn’t let this pass without calling it an “extreme analogy.” She then goes on to quiz him about Salesforce landing Groupon as a customer. (And revealing that Groupon CEO Andrew Mason went to Davos. Who knew?)

What else about Salesforce is extreme? Its price-to-earnings ratio is insane, at 602 times trailing earnings; which, of course, leads to the question of whether or not Salesforce is overpriced. Benioff, true to form, dodges the question. It’s all about growing the topline and gaining market share now, he says. No change there. Enjoy the video:

What does it take to build disruptive businesses in the midst of a revolution? As it turns out, it requires a culturally uncommon aversion to risk.

Amr Ramadan, Ziad Aly and Haytham El-Fadeel all hail from Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt — places recently in the international spotlight for news of political disruption.

In that time, though, these three have built high-tech businesses bucking the Egyptian trope of an antiquity-based economy.

Ramadan started Vimov, which developed Weather HD, the top selling weather app for Apple’s iPad. Aly is CEO of ALZWAD, a mobile content platform for feature phones in the Middle East, and El-Fadeel has built Kngine, a Wolfram Alpha-like infosearch service.

The trio recently did a quick tech tour of the U.S. entrepreneurial hotspots — Manhattan and Silicon Valley — on a trip led by Ahmed El Alfi.

Alfi is CEO of Sawari Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm invested in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA is the shorthand for the area).

So, I sat down with the group during the Silicon Valley leg of their tour to pick their brains on the realities of building businesses amidst so much political disruption.

U.S. pundits have been banging away, asserting that the revolution was really fomented by an overabundance of young, educated and unemployed Egyptians.

I asked the trio if those same circumstances might make for a good start-up culture.

Aly agreed that there had been a change since the revolution and he now sees a necessary boldness among founders that wasn’t there before.

“I saw an idea last week that’s a platform around where people can go out — similar to Yelp. The founder came up with the idea and a prototype,” he said. “Before [the revolution] you would never have seen this.”

Even though conditions were right for digital disruption, Ramadan explained that cultural attitudes about risk of failure remain even after the government has turned over.

Because while a failed start-up or two in Silicon Valley can be a mark of experience for an entrepreneur, he observed that in Egypt prior failures just mean you have a history of failing.

But he did acknowledge that things are very much in flux.

“Before [the revolution], the way to get ahead was find a government job and stay off the radar; now that doesn’t seem to be as much the case,” he added. “I think more young people are willing to look at a start-up and say ‘Why not?’”

Alfi, the venture capitalist who arranged the trip and who is invested in companies in the MENA region, said that enough money isn’t really an issue — smart money is.

“It’s the Middle East, there’s plenty of money around,” he said. “What we lack are enough experienced people to help guide these companies.”

The lack of “smart” investment is complicated by what Ramadan described as Egypt’s cash economy. Because there isn’t a large community of investors taking risks on tech start-ups, Egyptian companies have to turn a profit from day one.

“The idea of losing money for a couple of years … is not something common in Egypt,” he said. “Even the concept of credit is not really there.”

In other words, profit from day one in Egypt is the only way to pay for day two.

“So, a country with a decent crop of engineers and a fresh start seemed to me like a reasonable place to develop a start-up community, especially one that could build products for the Middle East, based around cultural norms that foreign companies might have difficulty designing for,” he added.

Aly, whose mobile content delivery platform is targeted only at Middle Eastern users, believes that the combination of pervasive 3G and 4G phone service and an uptick in social media interest post revolution are good signs for companies entering his market.

“Mobile is the primary [and, often, only] Internet device, as opposed to more mature markets,” he said. “Even the iPhone, until recently, had to be connected to iTunes.”

All three men noted that Twitter and Facebook were the social media platforms of the masses in Egypt, but Aly added a footnote to the popular (and much debated) news narrative about the Egyptian revolution and social media.

Rather than heavy social media usage facilitating a revolution, the opposite seems to be happening.

During the revolution, Twitter was the only way to get reliable information even if not everyone was on it,” he said. “Since the revolution we are seeing much more interest than before.”

The group did acknowledge the difficulties they face building operations in such a politically and socially dynamic region.

But most of their worries echoed the kinds of refrains one might hear from Silicon Valley companies: Difficulties attracting developers, trouble finding good advice and learning the lessons of surviving rapid growth seem to be at the top of everyone’s list — regardless of geography.

But the combo of education, mobile device use and social media adoption in Egypt seems like fertile enough ground for start-ups, at least to Alfi, who will launch an incubator there this year.

He thinks what the region needs most are a few good home runs for investors.

Referencing one such exit, Leslie Jump, Alfi’s colleague at Sawari Ventures, added: “We need a success story. Like the ICQ deal was for Israel, a high-profile exit would bring interest in investing in Egypt.”

Ghonim had been in Silicon Valley last week to visit Google, Twitter, and Dogpatch Labs. Googlers gave him a standing ovation at an appearance at a company staff meeting that was described as “emotional.”

In a speech at Stanford University organized by the school’s Muslim Student Awareness Network, Ghonim “spent the bulk of his talk outlining practical steps that can be taken to rebuild Egypt, calling upon his audience to mimic the ‘independent initiative’ of the protestors,” according to a campus newspaper report. He also invited attendees to sign up to help Egypt on a Google Doc.

Ghonim has given much credit to the Internet and specifically Facebook for helping facilitate the Egyptian uprising.

The move marks Intel’s vote of confidence in the post-Mubarak Egypt, in the earliest days of establishing a new political, cultural and economic identity. In addition, as one of the worlds leading global technology players, Intel has embraced the growing quality of innovation and engineering talent in their first acquisition in the Arab world. Dr. Christian Mucke, Vice President of Intel Mobile Communications, notes that “Egypt has a young, growing talent pool across multiple specializations, including the field of engineering, and we remain committed to Egypt as a strategic market.”

SySDSoft’s CEO and founder Dr. Khaled Ismail is a classic start-up story. Having received his PhD from MIT and the highest recognition from leading engineering institutions, Ismail founded his company out of passion and necessity. When the U.S. company for whom he built the Cairo operations failed to survive the bubble burst of 2001, he saw significant market and talent opportunity in region. Starting with two employees, he reflects on those early days, “It was not very difficult as I was blessed with a great team. My main challenge was always to find new customers abroad, who were willing to trust an Egyptian company to deliver top-notch technical work for them.” Find them he did, and as his operations grew to nearly 100 engineers, SySDSoft quickly moved from offering engineering design services to developing its own IP in the 4G telecom world. SySDSoft was named the first Endeavor High Impact Entrepreneurial Company in the Middle East in 2007.

Ismail has been active in fostering and mentoring young Egyptian entrepreneurs in technology and telecom. Between his success at SySDSoft, sitting on the board of Orascom–the largest telecom operator in the Middle East–and actively advising government and business leaders in how best to incubate new tech ideas, he is optimistic for the new generation following in his footsteps. “What will change,” he hopes, “is that young entrepreneurs may have more guts now to take the risk and hope for a good upside in case they are successful. After Jan 25, 2011, in fact, I am much more optimistic, since the overall environment is very crucial, and we hope that the change that has happened will entice a lot of young Egyptians to have a dream, take the risk, but have the patience to not simply chase quick profit.”

SySDSoft had received two offers to sell in recent years, but now, with the exponential growth in mobile services and pressure on time to market, the time was ripe to harvest opportunities in consolidation. Ismail notes, “During the past six months, there have been so many acquisitions in the domain or wireless technologies more broadly. We witnessed most of our small- to medium-size customers being acquired by big companies during that phase, which indicated that big consolidations are happening.” When Intel bought one of the leading wireless companies last August, Infineon Wireless, it also acquired one of SySDSoft’s most important customers. Ismail concluded, “We had an excellent working relationship with them. Also, Intel is one of the most advanced technology companies in the world that would allow our product, which we believe is best of its class in the world, to reach the hands of hundreds of millions very soon. Our IP is a part of their road map, and as our business is not capital intensive, we represent far less risk than other industries.”

Mucke agrees: “SySDSoft designs software IP solutions and RF/analog circuits embedded in mobile platforms and enhances Intel Mobile Communications’ existing multi-communications portfolio, specifically accelerating its 4G LTE efforts.”

Ismail will remain with Intel as the head of Intel Mobile Communication Egypt. “I have currently no other plans but to make it one of the most successful teams with Intel worldwide, and to win the 4G chipset battle such that an Egyptian product will be in the hands of more than a billion users within five years from now.”

Intel is sizing up the best approaches in Egypt and the region overall. “Intel remains committed to the Egyptian market and the region has a young, growing talent pool,” Mucke explains. “We are currently in the process of evaluating the market and the financial impact to Intel as a result of the Egypt revolution, and are working with the ecosystem on identifying how Intel can help rebuild and restructure the Egyptian PC market.”

Christopher M. Schroeder is a Washington, DC-based angel investor in U.S. companies and CEO of the leading collection of condition-specific, social health web sites at healthcentral.com. He recently returned from Cairo, Damascus and Dubai, examining the region’s start-up community, and was a delegate in the State Department Global Entrepreneurship Program as a judge for Egypt’s new venture business plan competition. He can be followed at @cmschroed.

Last night, Bill Clinton–arguably the first Internet President–got a little nostalgic.

“We are actually here today because the people sitting in your seats 20 years ago imagined a different world, though they didn’t know exactly how it would come out,” he said in a keynote speech for the 40th meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN, at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco. “They just knew that a networked world would probably work better than a bureaucratic one.”

Yes, indeed, the world has come a long way from when Clinton was in office.

In fact, Clinton noted that to the 800 attendees last night–correctly calling himself “the president at the dawn of the Internet age”–that there were only 50 Web sites in 1993 when he was inaugurated, and 36 million when his term was up in 2001.

Clinton’s speech, a paid appearance, touched on his history with ICANN, as well as the intersection of the Internet, geopolitics, poverty, the global distribution of wealth and infrastructure.

ICANN is the multinational, non-governmental organization that researches, debates and enforces decisions that affect how traffic gets sent around the pipes of the Internet.

It decides, for instance, that Libyan domain names end in .ly.

Clinton’s focus last night was urging the international crowd to try to use technology and their positions around it to build physical and financial infrastructure systems for poorer nations.

He called for a renewed focus on technology-sector job growth and touched the geopolitical implications of free access to the Internet.

Invoking the recent revolution in Egypt, he said that ICANN needed to ensure universal access to a free Internet and the continued vibrancy of the Web.

“That’s why it’s important that you want the Internet to stay forever young,” said Clinton. “One hundred years from now, you want somebody in some godforsaken place that’s been beat down to be able to do what the kids in Cairo did.”

At the conclusion of the address, Clinton sat on stage with ICANN President and CEO Rod Beckstorm and answered pre-selected questions.

The former President mostly stayed above the fray of the major debates surrounding this ICANN meeting, only peripherally mentioning the next day’s headline issue–the possible adoption of the .xxx top level domain.

That issue has seethed online for several years, and was supposed to come to a head Thursday. Several attendees related that a troupe of porn stars were expected at the following day’s meetings to protest the adoption of the .xxx domain for adult sites on the Web, as a modern day scarlet letter.

President Clinton’s most direct response was related to sales tax being levied on online purchases. It was his policy preference at the beginning of the e-commerce era to keep sales tax out of online transactions, so that those companies could have the chance to grow, he explained. He said that e-commerce didn’t seem to need the help anymore, and Amazon’s complaints about recent changes sounded like “a high class problem.”

ICANN 40 wraps up Friday, but won’t conclude before addressing other key topics, such as solving the global shortage of IP addresses–the unique numbers that identify every Internet-connected device–and aiding the proliferation of the next generation of online security protocols.

Adding more numbers to the list of IPs, or verifying a site’s identity, doesn’t sound complex. But, on the global scale, even simple changes require massive coordination.

Another issue: Lack of international enforcement could create a haven for online fraud in countries that can least afford it.

It was on this point that the former President’s speech and ICANN’s actual agenda converged.

“We need to ask ourselves if we are forming a more perfect union across the globe,” he said, urging those in the room not to get mired in small disagreements.

His advice: Focus on the larger mission of ensuring that the benefits of Internet access will be distributed equally, worldwide and beyond the foreseeable future.

“You have to be vigilant, because at some point all institutions are led by people more interested in maintaining the present than creating the future,” he said.

Word, Bill.

The folks at Internet research firm Renesys, who first gained attention for tracking Egypt’s disconnection from the Internet, and then similar events in Libya, say they’re surprised by how little the quakes have affected the undersea Internet cables that keep Japan connected to the rest of the world. Only a small fraction of Japanese connections went down and many of those have come back up since. This is good news because the Internet is providing a badly needed communication link both within Japan and between it and the rest of the world.

It’s a much different story from the Taiwan earthquake in 2006 that broke several undersea cables and knocked several carriers out of service.

That’s not to say there hasn’t been damage. There have been breaks in two segments of Pacnet’s EAC cable system. And the Pacific Crossing system has also gone down since the earthquake. This is the cable once featured in a Wired photo essay “Tracing the Journey of a Single Bit.” The Pacific Crossing site currently displays a message that reads: “The Japanese cable landing station in Ajigaura has been evacuated due to the tsunami on the east coast of Japan and currently information on restoration activities and timing is unavailable. Further updates will be posted as additional information becomes available.”

Meanwhile, I’ve been keeping track of all the aftershocks — and there have an alarming number of them — via the Earthquake Notification Service operated by the US Geological Survey. Subscribe and you get an automated email alert any time there’s an earthquake anywhere in the world, though you can specify by region and by the Richter Scale intensity so your in box is overloaded. For example I get alerts on North American quakes of greater than Richter 5.5, and all quakes around the world greater than Richter 6.5. When a big quake hits you’ll know about it well before the cable networks start flashing their “Breaking News” banners.

Finally, you can keep up with the constant stream of updates out of the Japan via this ongoing blog from our friends at The Wall Street Journal.

(Image via Wikimedia Commons)

The new local versions are for Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Yemen. There isn’t one for Libya, where YouTube has been blocked since January.

YouTube already offers an Arabic version and hosts lots of content from users in the Middle East, including news networks Al Arabia and Al Jazeera. And the site is mostly available to Internet users in the region, though it has been blocked by ISPs in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya at the request of local governments both as a domain and as part of general Internet shutoffs over the last few months.

The most important aspects of the local versions of YouTube are dedicated home pages that show the most popular and trending videos in each country. This makes local videos much easier to find, especially because some of the most interesting videos on YouTube come from people who were previously unknown.

Previously, would-be viewers might have had to do extensive searching on YouTube or rely on Facebook, Twitter and news outlets to find important new video posts from these countries.

To whatever extent citizens watch and share local videos, the Middle East pages could mean that YouTube is a bigger touchpoint for on-the-street accounts from protests and other timely content. It should also make it easier for the rest of the world to find such videos.

YouTube seems to be playing down the political implication of the Middle East pages, though it seems obvious given the timing. In an announcement written in Arabic on the Google Arabia Blog (and not yet cross-posted on YouTube’s main blog or its news and politics blog), the company highlighted Jordanian cartoonist DinaKaradsheh, popular Lebanese musician Nancy Ajram and professional news networks–rather than calling out the opportunities to more easily find citizen video.

The post, written by Associate Product Marketing Manager Najeeb Jarrar, ended with a sort of plea to keep the Middle East discourse open:

Of course, the YouTube community reflects the whole world, with its vast differences of ethnicity, religion, nationality, language, politics and more. Not everything on YouTube will please everyone, and we encourage people to actively participate, learn the rules and flag content that might violate them. In the end, YouTube is a place where people go to exchange all kinds of ideas, and we hope you will join the conversation.

Repeating a move it made last week, the government of Muammar Gaddafi has once again taken itself off the Internet, according to Renesys, an Internet research firm, and Google’s Transparency Report.

Renesys says its traceroute pings — which are used to measure network heath and uptime — show that the connections remain live, but that traffic is apparently being intercepted as it reaches Libyan territory and sent into something of a black hole. Technically speaking this is different from what happened in Egypt last month, where servers were though to have have been simply shut down.

The Internet may seem secondary right now giving the gravity of events taking place there today, but the flow of correct information always becomes valuable — and therefore vulnerable — in the heat of violence such as this. Today there were reports of forces loyal to Gaddafi firing on people taking part in protests after Friday prayers, with dozens killed and scores more wounded. Meanwhile there was more fighting in the rebel-held town of Zawiya. Government forces tried to retake the town today, and as many as 35 were reported killed, with still more wounded.

It’s also unclear if, as was the case with Egypt, if wireless phone networks have been affected. The Wall Street Journal has a more complete report on the situation there.

That was fast.

Which is probably apt, given the subject matter of a book coming out soon made up of real-time Twitter from Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

“Tweets from Tahrir,” which is being published by Or Books on April 21, says it is chronicling “an entirely new way of telling history.”

It will indeed be interesting to see all the myriad of tweets compiled in one place.

And the impact of social tools on the various protests in the Mideast will definitely be great fodder for some historian in the future.

That said, some think the focus on Silicon Valley social tools, such as Twitter and Facebook, rather than on the people’s will, is overhyped.

Still, social networking is simply a reflection of humanity, so examining its impact is well worth a read.

Plus, tweets are only 140 characters, so it is an easy one too.

Here is the press release on the book:

TWEETS FROM TAHRIR

Egypt’s Revolution as It Unfolded, in the Words of the People Who Made It

Edited by NADIA IDLE and ALEX NUNNS

With a foreword by AHDAF SOUEIF

Gsquare86M Gigi Ibrahim
Everyone in Cairo who wants Mubarak out and stands for justice come to Tahrir NOW!
Feb 2

“Without the new media the Egyptian Revolution could not have happened in the way that it did. The causes of the revolution were many; deep-rooted and long seated. The turning moment had come–but it was the instant and wide-spread nature of the new media that made it possible to recognise the moment and to push it into such an effective manifestation.”

–Ahdaf Soueif

The Twitter accounts of the activists who brought heady days of revolution to Egypt in January and February this year paint an exhilarating picture of an uprising in real-time. Thousands of young people documented on cell phones every stage of the action, as it happened. This book brings together a selection of key tweets in a compelling, fast-paced narrative, allowing the story of the uprising to be told directly by the people in Tahrir Square.

Some of the activists were ‘citizen journalists’, using Twitter to report on what was happening. Others used the social network to organize, communicating the next steps necessary for the revolution to move forward. Nearly everyone online gave instant reactions to the extraordinary events occurring before their eyes.

History has never before been recorded in this fashion. The tweet limit of 140 characters evidently concentrated the feelings of those using Twitter. Raw emotions burst from their messages, whether frantic alarm at attacks from pro-government thugs or delirious happiness at the fall of the dictator. To read these tweets is to embark a rollercoaster ride, from the surprise and excitement of the first demonstration, to the horror of the violence that claimed hundreds of lives, to the final ecstasy of victory.

Many of those tweeting also took photographs with their phones and these are used to illustrate the book, providing remarkable snapshots from the heart of the action.

Edited by young activists Alex Nunns and Nadia Idle, an Egyptian who was in Tahrir Square when Mubarak fell, Tweets from Tahrir is a highly original take on one of the most important and dramatic events in recent world politics. The result is as gripping as any thriller–but it’s all real.

At one end of the spectrum, Columbia Law School professor Eben Moglen is touting low-cost devices, called Freedom Boxes, that can act as encrypted, network-independent routers for news and information sent via cell phones to loosely-federated social networks.

At the other end of the technological spectrum, the owner of a Kuwaiti television station and newspaper, Sheikh Fahad Al Salem Al Ali Al Sabah, is trying to create a network of international satellite TV channels “dedicated to building bridges between civilizations so as to permit greater dialogue between worlds, culture and religions.” According to a statement provided to Digits, “The objective is to utilize citizen journalism and new technologies (i.e. mobile phones) to compile content from everyday citizens acting as ‘reporters.’”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The following is an edited version of the interview.

WSJ: What is the future of the Internet?

Mr. Cerf: There are several trends which will carry the Internet over the next several years. First is mobile–mobile technology and the access to the Internet via mobile devices is becoming extremely important. We’re also seeing Internet infrastructure reach more deeply into places where there isn’t any–in places like Africa. Another trend is submarine cables and satellite capability while another trend is the ability to bring video and audio to entertainment devices in cars or homes using the Internet.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Yesterday, in a major policy speech in Washington, D.C., Secretary of State Hillary Clinton jumped on the Internet bandwagon again, unveiling a $25 million government investment for entrepreneurs to allow dissidents to thwart “thugs, hackers and censors.”

Since that’s about the amount a third-string social photo-sharing site gets while walking down University Avenue in Palo Alto, Calif., from venture capitalists with bags of money to spend, let me just say the money is, well, underwhelming.

Luckily, Clinton’s speech–the latest chapter of the Obama administration’s “Internet Freedom Agenda”–was much better.

In fact, it was a sobering look at the situation, replete with all its conflicts and compromises, including some related to the State Department of late (hello, WikiLeaks!).

While more of a gimmick, Clinton outlined what she called a “venture capital-style approach” to stopping governments from closing down digital communications platforms.

In Egypt, that has included the whole dang Internet after times got tough and protesters tweeted too much.

Even still, said Clinton, such efforts–however effective now–were ultimately useless.

“Those who clamp down on Internet freedom may be able to hold back the full expression of their people’s yearnings for a while, but not forever,” she said.

Still, even though Facebook and Twitter have been lauded as critical tools in the reform protests in the Mideast, those Luddite strongmen did manage to put up a very good fight in shutting them down.

But Clinton advocated pressing on. Along with the seed funding for firewall-piercing and evading technologies, she also announced the creation of a new coordinator for cyber issues and the fact that the State Department had just begun to tweet in Arabic and Farsi and would soon be doing so in Chinese, Hindi and Russian.

All very nice steps, but the overall arrival of the long-promised global “strategy for cyberspace,” which has gotten bogged down in politics, is still to come.

In fact, a GOP-fueled criticism of the State Department was also released yesterday, designed to muck up Clinton’s speech, about how another $30 million in digital investments was being spent or, more precisely, being spent badly.

Clinton answered critics:

“Some have criticized us for not pouring funding into a single technology–but there is no silver bullet in the struggle against Internet repression. There’s no ‘app’ for that.”

Well, actually, since there is an app that turns your Apple iPhone into a hand massager, there certainly should be.

Speaking of that, Clinton was deft at dealing with the obvious delta between pressing for Internet freedom, even as U.S. government lawyers were whacking away at WikiLeaks–and, by association, Twitter itself.

Clinton noted the release of a mass of classified State Department documents “began with an act of theft,” arguing that this was the real issue.

She went on to further argue:

“I said that the WikiLeaks incident began with a theft, just as if it had been executed by smuggling papers in a briefcase. The fact that WikiLeaks used the Internet is not the reason we criticized its actions. WikiLeaks does not challenge our commitment to Internet freedom.”

Actually, the issue is that the Internet, once it really gets going, doesn’t really want to be controlled by anyone.

Kind of like humanity.

Or as Clinton so correctly noted about the various protests taking place abroad:

“In each case, people protested because of deep frustrations with the political and economic conditions of their lives. They stood and marched and chanted and the authorities tracked and blocked and arrested them. The Internet did not do any of those things; people did.”

In any case, judge for yourself: Here’s the video of the speech at George Washington University from the State Department’s Web site, as well as the full text below:

Thank you all very much and good afternoon. It is a pleasure, once again, to be back on the campus of the George Washington University, a place that I have spent quite a bit of time in all different settings over the last now nearly 20 years. I’d like especially to thank President Knapp and Provost Lerman, because this is a great opportunity for me to address such a significant issue, and one which deserves the attention of citizens, governments, and I know is drawing that attention. And perhaps today in my remarks, we can begin a much more vigorous debate that will respond to the needs that we have been watching in real time on our television sets.

A few minutes after midnight on January 28th, the Internet went dark across Egypt. During the previous four days, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians had marched to demand a new government. And the world, on TVs, laptops, cell phones, and smart phones, had followed every single step. Pictures and videos from Egypt flooded the web. On Facebook and Twitter, journalists posted on-the-spot reports. Protestors coordinated their next moves. And citizens of all stripes shared their hopes and fears about this pivotal moment in the history of their country.

Millions worldwide answered in real time, “You are not alone and we are with you.” Then the government pulled the plug. Cell phone service was cut off, TV satellite signals were jammed, and Internet access was blocked for nearly the entire population. The government did not want the people to communicate with each other and it did not want the press to communicate with the public. It certainly did not want the world to watch.

The events in Egypt recalled another protest movement 18 months earlier in Iran, when thousands marched after disputed elections. Their protestors also used websites to organize. A video taken by cell phone showed a young woman named Neda killed by a member of the paramilitary forces, and within hours, that video was being watched by people everywhere.

The Iranian authorities used technology as well. The Revolutionary Guard stalked members of the Green Movement by tracking their online profiles. And like Egypt, for a time, the government shut down the internet and mobile networks altogether. After the authorities raided homes, attacked university dorms, made mass arrests, tortured and fired shots into crowds, the protests ended.

In Egypt, however, the story ended differently. The protests continued despite the internet shutdown. People organized marches through flyers and word of mouth and used dial-up modems and fax machines to communicate with the world. After five days, the government relented and Egypt came back online. The authorities then sought to use the Internet to control the protests by ordering mobile companies to send out pro-government text messages, and by arresting bloggers and those who organized the protests online. But 18 days after the protests began, the government failed and the president resigned.

What happened in Egypt and what happened in Iran, which this week is once again using violence against protestors seeking basic freedoms, was about a great deal more than the internet. In each case, people protested because of deep frustrations with the political and economic conditions of their lives. They stood and marched and chanted and the authorities tracked and blocked and arrested them. The Internet did not do any of those things; people did. In both of these countries, the ways that citizens and the authorities used the Internet reflected the power of connection technologies on the one hand as an accelerant of political, social, and economic change, and on the other hand as a means to stifle or extinguish that change.

There is a debate currently underway in some circles about whether the Internet is a force for liberation or repression. But I think that debate is largely beside the point. Egypt isn’t inspiring people because they communicated using Twitter. It is inspiring because people came together and persisted in demanding a better future. Iran isn’t awful because the authorities used Facebook to shadow and capture members of the opposition. Iran is awful because it is a government that routinely violates the rights of its people.

So it is our values that cause these actions to inspire or outrage us, our sense of human dignity, the rights that flow from it, and the principles that ground it. And it is these values that ought to drive us to think about the road ahead. Two billion people are now online, nearly a third of humankind. We hail from every corner of the world, live under every form of government, and subscribe to every system of beliefs. And increasingly, we are turning to the Internet to conduct important aspects of our lives.

The Internet has become the public space of the 21st century–the world’s town square, classroom, marketplace, coffeehouse, and nightclub. We all shape and are shaped by what happens there, all 2 billion of us and counting. And that presents a challenge. To maintain an Internet that delivers the greatest possible benefits to the world, we need to have a serious conversation about the principles that will guide us, what rules exist and should not exist and why, what behaviors should be encouraged or discouraged and how.

The goal is not to tell people how to use the Internet any more than we ought to tell people how to use any public square, whether it’s Tahrir Square or Times Square. The value of these spaces derives from the variety of activities people can pursue in them, from holding a rally to selling their vegetables, to having a private conversation. These spaces provide an open platform, and so does the Internet. It does not serve any particular agenda, and it never should. But if people around the world are going come together every day online and have a safe and productive experience, we need a shared vision to guide us.

One year ago, I offered a starting point for that vision by calling for a global commitment to Internet freedom, to protect human rights online as we do offline. The rights of individuals to express their views freely, petition their leaders, worship according to their beliefs–these rights are universal, whether they are exercised in a public square or on an individual blog. The freedoms to assemble and associate also apply in cyberspace. In our time, people are as likely to come together to pursue common interests online as in a church or a labor hall.

Together, the freedoms of expression, assembly, and association online comprise what I’ve called the freedom to connect. The United States supports this freedom for people everywhere, and we have called on other nations to do the same. Because we want people to have the chance to exercise this freedom. We also support expanding the number of people who have access to the Internet. And because the Internet must work evenly and reliably for it to have value, we support the multi-stakeholder system that governs the internet today, which has consistently kept it up and running through all manner of interruptions across networks, borders, and regions.

In the year since my speech, people worldwide have continued to use the Internet to solve shared problems and expose public corruption, from the people in Russia who tracked wildfires online and organized a volunteer firefighting squad, to the children in Syria who used Facebook to reveal abuse by their teachers, to the Internet campaign in China that helps parents find their missing children.

At the same time, the Internet continues to be restrained in a myriad of ways. In China, the government censors content and redirects search requests to error pages. In Burma, independent news sites have been taken down with distributed denial of service attacks. In Cuba, the government is trying to create a national intranet, while not allowing their citizens to access the global internet. In Vietnam, bloggers who criticize the government are arrested and abused. In Iran, the authorities block opposition and media websites, target social media, and steal identifying information about their own people in order to hunt them down.

These actions reflect a landscape that is complex and combustible, and sure to become more so in the coming years as billions of more people connect to the Internet. The choices we make today will determine what the Internet looks like in the future. Businesses have to choose whether and how to enter markets where internet freedom is limited. People have to choose how to act online, what information to share and with whom, which ideas to voice and how to voice them. Governments have to choose to live up to their commitments to protect free expression, assembly, and association.

For the United States, the choice is clear. On the spectrum of Internet freedom, we place ourselves on the side of openness. Now, we recognize that an open Internet comes with challenges. It calls for ground rules to protect against wrongdoing and harm. And Internet freedom raises tensions, like all freedoms do. But we believe the benefits far exceed the costs.

And today, I’d like to discuss several of the challenges we must confront as we seek to protect and defend a free and open Internet. Now, I’m the first to say that neither I nor the United States Government has all the answers. We’re not sure we have all the questions. But we are committed to asking the questions, to helping lead a conversation, and to defending not just universal principles but the interests of our people and our partners.

The first challenge is achieving both liberty and security. Liberty and security are often presented as equal and opposite; the more you have of one, the less you have of the other. In fact, I believe they make it each other possible. Without security, liberty is fragile. Without liberty, security is oppressive. The challenge is finding the proper measure: enough security to enable our freedoms, but not so much or so little as to endanger them.

Finding this proper measure for the Internet is critical because the qualities that make the internet a force for unprecedented progress–its openness, its leveling effect, its reach and speed–also enable wrongdoing on an unprecedented scale. Terrorists and extremist groups use the Internet to recruit members, and plot and carry out attacks. Human traffickers use the Internet to find and lure new victims into modern-day slavery. Child pornographers use the Internet to exploit children. Hackers break into financial institutions, cell phone networks, and personal email accounts.

So we need successful strategies for combating these threats and more without constricting the openness that is the Internet’s greatest attribute. The United States is aggressively tracking and deterring criminals and terrorists online. We are investing in our nation’s cyber-security, both to prevent cyber-incidents and to lessen their impact. We are cooperating with other countries to fight transnational crime in cyberspace. The United States Government invests in helping other nations build their own law enforcement capacity. We have also ratified the Budapest Cybercrime Convention, which sets out the steps countries must take to ensure that the internet is not misused by criminals and terrorists while still protecting the liberties of our own citizens.

In our vigorous effort to prevent attacks or apprehend criminals, we retain a commitment to human rights and fundamental freedoms. The United States is determined to stop terrorism and criminal activity online and offline, and in both spheres we are committed to pursuing these goals in accordance with our laws and values.

Now, others have taken a different approach. Security is often invoked as a justification for harsh crackdowns on freedom. Now, this tactic is not new to the digital age, but it has new resonance as the internet has given governments new capacities for tracking and punishing human rights advocates and political dissidents. Governments that arrest bloggers, pry into the peaceful activities of their citizens, and limit their access to the Internet may claim to be seeking security. In fact, they may even mean it as they define it. But they are taking the wrong path. Those who clamp down on Internet freedom may be able to hold back the full expression of their people’s yearnings for a while, but not forever.

The second challenge is protecting both transparency and confidentiality. The Internet’s strong culture of transparency derives from its power to make information of all kinds available instantly. But in addition to being a public space, the Internet is also a channel for private communications. And for that to continue, there must be protection for confidential communication online. Think of all the ways in which people and organizations rely on confidential communications to do their jobs. Businesses hold confidential conversations when they’re developing new products to stay ahead of their competitors. Journalists keep the details of some sources confidential to protect them from exposure or retribution. And governments also rely on confidential communication online as well as offline. The existence of connection technologies may make it harder to maintain confidentiality, but it does not alter the need for it.

Now, I know that government confidentiality has been a topic of debate during the past few months because of WikiLeaks, but it’s been a false debate in many ways. Fundamentally, the WikiLeaks incident began with an act of theft. Government documents were stolen, just the same as if they had been smuggled out in a briefcase. Some have suggested that this theft was justified because governments have a responsibility to conduct all of our work out in the open in the full view of our citizens. I respectfully disagree. The United States could neither provide for our citizens’ security nor promote the cause of human rights and democracy around the world if we had to make public every step of our efforts. Confidential communication gives our government the opportunity to do work that could not be done otherwise.

Consider our work with former Soviet states to secure loose nuclear material. By keeping the details confidential, we make it less likely that terrorists or criminals will find the nuclear material and steal it for their own purposes. Or consider the content of the documents that WikiLeaks made public. Without commenting on the authenticity of any particular documents, we can observe that many of the cables released by WikiLeaks relate to human rights work carried on around the world. Our diplomats closely collaborate with activists, journalists, and citizens to challenge the misdeeds of oppressive governments. It is dangerous work. By publishing diplomatic cables, WikiLeaks exposed people to even greater risk.

For operations like these, confidentiality is essential, especially in the Internet age when dangerous information can be sent around the world with the click of a keystroke. But of course, governments also have a duty to be transparent. We govern with the consent of the people, and that consent must be informed to be meaningful. So we must be judicious about when we close off our work to the public, and we must review our standards frequently to make sure they are rigorous. In the United States, we have laws designed to ensure that the government makes its work open to the people, and the Obama Administration has also launched an unprecedented initiative to put government data online, to encourage citizen participation, and to generally increase the openness of government.

The U.S. Government’s ability to protect America, to secure the liberties of our people, and to support the rights and freedoms of others around the world depends on maintaining a balance between what’s public and what should and must remain out of the public domain. The scale should and will always be tipped in favor of openness, but tipping the scale over completely serves no one’s interests. Let me be clear. I said that the WikiLeaks incident began with a theft, just as if it had been executed by smuggling papers in a briefcase. The fact that WikiLeaks used the Internet is not the reason we criticized its actions. WikiLeaks does not challenge our commitment to Internet freedom.

And one final word on this matter: There were reports in the days following these leaks that the United States Government intervened to coerce private companies to deny service to WikiLeaks. That is not the case. Now, some politicians and pundits publicly called for companies to disassociate from WikiLeaks, while others criticized them for doing so. Public officials are part of our country’s public debates, but there is a line between expressing views and coercing conduct. Business decisions that private companies may have taken to enforce their own values or policies regarding WikiLeaks were not at the direction of the Obama Administration.

A third challenge is protecting free expression while fostering tolerance and civility. I don’t need to tell this audience that the Internet is home to every kind of speech–false, offensive, incendiary, innovative, truthful, and beautiful.

The multitude of opinions and ideas that crowd the Internet is both a result of its openness and a reflection of our human diversity. Online, everyone has a voice. And the Universal Declaration of Human Rights protects the freedom of expression for all. But what we say has consequences. Hateful or defamatory words can inflame hostilities, deepen divisions, and provoke violence. On the Internet, this power is heightened. Intolerant speech is often amplified and impossible to retract. Of course, the Internet also provides a unique space for people to bridge their differences and build trust and understanding.

Some take the view that, to encourage tolerance, some hateful ideas must be silenced by governments. We believe that efforts to curb the content of speech rarely succeed and often become an excuse to violate freedom of expression. Instead, as it has historically been proven time and time again, the better answer to offensive speech is more speech. People can and should speak out against intolerance and hatred. By exposing ideas to debate, those with merit tend to be strengthened, while weak and false ideas tend to fade away; perhaps not instantly, but eventually.

Now, this approach does not immediately discredit every hateful idea or convince every bigot to reverse his thinking. But we have determined as a society that it is far more effective than any other alternative approach. Deleting writing, blocking content, arresting speakers–these actions suppress words, but they do not touch the underlying ideas. They simply drive people with those ideas to the fringes, where their convictions can deepen, unchallenged.

Last summer, Hannah Rosenthal, the U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism, made a trip to Dachau and Auschwitz with a delegation of American imams and Muslim leaders. Many of them had previously denied the Holocaust, and none of them had ever denounced Holocaust denial. But by visiting the concentration camps, they displayed a willingness to consider a different view. And the trip had a real impact. They prayed together, and they signed messages of peace, and many of those messages in the visitors books were written in Arabic. At the end of the trip, they read a statement that they wrote and signed together condemning without reservation Holocaust denial and all other forms of anti-Semitism.

The marketplace of ideas worked. Now, these leaders had not been arrested for their previous stance or ordered to remain silent. Their mosques were not shut down. The state did not compel them with force. Others appealed to them with facts. And their speech was dealt with through the speech of others.

The United States does restrict certain kinds of speech in accordance with the rule of law and our international obligations. We have rules about libel and slander, defamation, and speech that incites imminent violence. But we enforce these rules transparently, and citizens have the right to appeal how they are applied. And we don’t restrict speech even if the majority of people find it offensive. History, after all, is full of examples of ideas that were banned for reasons that we now see as wrong. People were punished for denying the divine right of kings, or suggesting that people should be treated equally regardless of race, gender, or religion. These restrictions might have reflected the dominant view at the time, and variations on these restrictions are still in force in places around the world.

But when it comes to online speech, the United States has chosen not to depart from our time-tested principles. We urge our people to speak with civility, to recognize the power and reach that their words can have online. We’ve seen in our own country tragic examples of how online bullying can have terrible consequences. Those of us in government should lead by example, in the tone we set and the ideas we champion. But leadership also means empowering people to make their own choices, rather than intervening and taking those choices away. We protect free speech with the force of law, and we appeal to the force of reason to win out over hate.

Now, these three large principles are not always easy to advance at once. They raise tensions, and they pose challenges. But we do not have to choose among them. Liberty and security, transparency and confidentiality, freedom of expression and tolerance–these all make up the foundation of a free, open, and secure society as well as a free, open, and secure internet where universal human rights are respected, and which provides a space for greater progress and prosperity over the long run.

Now, some countries are trying a different approach, abridging rights online and working to erect permanent walls between different activities–economic exchanges, political discussions, religious expressions, and social interactions. They want to keep what they like and suppress what they don’t. But this is no easy task. Search engines connect businesses to new customers, and they also attract users because they deliver and organize news and information. Social networking sites aren’t only places where friends share photos; they also share political views and build support for social causes or reach out to professional contacts to collaborate on new business opportunities.

Walls that divide the Internet, that block political content, or ban broad categories of expression, or allow certain forms of peaceful assembly but prohibit others, or intimidate people from expressing their ideas are far easier to erect than to maintain. Not just because people using human ingenuity find ways around them and through them but because there isn’t an economic Internet and a social Internet and a political Internet; there’s just the Internet. And maintaining barriers that attempt to change this reality entails a variety of costs–moral, political, and economic. Countries may be able to absorb these costs for a time, but we believe they are unsustainable in the long run. There are opportunity costs for trying to be open for business but closed for free expression–costs to a nation’s education system, its political stability, its social mobility, and its economic potential.

When countries curtail Internet freedom, they place limits on their economic future. Their young people don’t have full access to the conversations and debates happening in the world or exposure to the kind of free inquiry that spurs people to question old ways of doing and invent new ones. And barring criticism of officials makes governments more susceptible to corruption, which create economic distortions with long-term effects. Freedom of thought and the level playing field made possible by the rule of law are part of what fuels innovation economies.

So it;s not surprising that the European-American Business Council, a group of more than 70 companies, made a strong public support statement last week for Internet freedom. If you invest in countries with aggressive censorship and surveillance policies, your website could be shut down without warning, your servers hacked by the government, your designs stolen, or your staff threatened with arrest or expulsion for failing to comply with a politically motivated order. The risks to your bottom line and to your integrity will at some point outweigh the potential rewards, especially if there are market opportunities elsewhere.

Now, some have pointed to a few countries, particularly China, that appears to stand out as an exception, a place where Internet censorship is high and economic growth is strong. Clearly, many businesses are willing to endure restrictive internet policies to gain access to those markets, and in the short term, even perhaps in the medium term, those governments may succeed in maintaining a segmented internet. But those restrictions will have long-term costs that threaten one day to become a noose that restrains growth and development.

There are political costs as well. Consider Tunisia, where online economic activity was an important part of the country’s ties with Europe while online censorship was on par with China and Iran, the effort to divide the economic internet from the “everything else” Internet in Tunisia could not be sustained. People, especially young people, found ways to use connection technologies to organize and share grievances, which, as we know, helped fuel a movement that led to revolutionary change. In Syria, too, the government is trying to negotiate a non-negotiable contradiction. Just last week, it lifted a ban on Facebook and YouTube for the first time in three years, and yesterday they convicted a teenage girl of espionage and sentenced her to five years in prison for the political opinions she expressed on her blog.

This, too, is unsustainable. The demand for access to platforms of expression cannot be satisfied when using them lands you in prison. We believe that governments who have erected barriers to Internet freedom, whether they’re technical filters or censorship regimes or attacks on those who exercise their rights to expression and assembly online, will eventually find themselves boxed in. They will face a dictator’s dilemma and will have to choose between letting the walls fall or paying the price to keep them standing, which means both doubling down on a losing hand by resorting to greater oppression and enduring the escalating opportunity cost of missing out on the ideas that have been blocked and people who have been disappeared.

I urge countries everywhere instead to join us in the bet we have made, a bet that an open internet will lead to stronger, more prosperous countries. At its core, it’s an extension of the bet that the United States has been making for more than 200 years, that open societies give rise to the most lasting progress, that the rule of law is the firmest foundation for justice and peace, and that innovation thrives where ideas of all kinds are aired and explored. This is not a bet on computers or mobile phones. It’s a bet on people. We’re confident that together with those partners in government and people around the world who are making the same bet by hewing to universal rights that underpin open societies, we’ll preserve the internet as an open space for all. And that will pay long-term gains for our shared progress and prosperity. The United States will continue to promote an Internet where people’s rights are protected and that it is open to innovation, interoperable all over the world, secure enough to hold people’s trust, and reliable enough to support their work.

In the past year, we have welcomed the emergence of a global coalition of countries, businesses, civil society groups, and digital activists seeking to advance these goals. We have found strong partners in several governments worldwide, and we’ve been encouraged by the work of the Global Network Initiative, which brings together companies, academics, and NGOs to work together to solve the challenges we are facing, like how to handle government requests for censorship or how to decide whether to sell technologies that could be used to violate rights or how to handle privacy issues in the context of cloud computing. We need strong corporate partners that have made principled, meaningful commitments to internet freedom as we work together to advance this common cause.

We realize that in order to be meaningful, online freedoms must carry over into real-world activism. That’s why we are working through our Civil Society 2.0 initiative to connect NGOs and advocates with technology and training that will magnify their impact. We are also committed to continuing our conversation with people everywhere around the world. Last week, you may have heard, we launched Twitter feeds in Arabic and Farsi, adding to the ones we already have in French and Spanish. We’ll start similar ones in Chinese, Russian, and Hindi. This is enabling us to have real-time, two-way conversations with people wherever there is a connection that governments do not block.

Our commitment to internet freedom is a commitment to the rights of people, and we are matching that with our actions. Monitoring and responding to threats to internet freedom has become part of the daily work of our diplomats and development experts. They are working to advance internet freedom on the ground at our embassies and missions around the world. The United States continues to help people in oppressive internet environments get around filters, stay one step ahead of the censors, the hackers, and the thugs who beat them up or imprison them for what they say online.

While the rights we seek to protect and support are clear, the various ways that these rights are violated are increasingly complex. I know some have criticized us for not pouring funding into a single technology, but we believe there is no silver bullet in the struggle against internet repression. There’s no app for that. Start working, those of you out there. And accordingly, we are taking a comprehensive and innovative approach, one that matches our diplomacy with technology, secure distribution networks for tools, and direct support for those on the front lines.

In the last three years, we have awarded more than $20 million in competitive grants through an open process, including interagency evaluation by technical and policy experts to support a burgeoning group of technologists and activists working at the cutting edge of the fight against internet repression. This year, we will award more than $25 million in additional funding. We are taking a venture capital-style approach, supporting a portfolio of technologies, tools, and training, and adapting as more users shift to mobile devices. We have our ear to the ground, talking to digital activists about where they need help, and our diversified approach means we’re able to adapt the range of threats that they face. We support multiple tools, so if repressive governments figure out how to target one, others are available. And we invest in the cutting edge because we know that repressive governments are constantly innovating their methods of oppression and we intend to stay ahead of them.

Likewise, we are leading the push to strengthen cyber security and online innovation, building capacity in developing countries, championing open and interoperable standards and enhancing international cooperation to respond to cyber threats. Deputy Secretary of Defense Lynn gave a speech on this issue just yesterday. All these efforts build on a decade of work to sustain an Internet that is open, secure, and reliable. And in the coming year, the Administration will complete an international strategy for cyberspace, charting the course to continue this work into the future.

This is a foreign policy priority for us, one that will only increase in importance in the coming years. That’s why I’ve created the Office of the Coordinator for Cyber Issues, to enhance our work on cyber security and other issues and facilitate cooperation across the State Department and with other government agencies. I’ve named Christopher Painter, formerly senior director for cyber security at the National Security Council and a leader in the field for 20 years, to head this new office.

The dramatic increase in internet users during the past 10 years has been remarkable to witness. But that was just the opening act. In the next 20 years, nearly 5 billion people will join the network. It is those users who will decide the future.

So we are playing for the long game. Unlike much of what happens online, progress on this front will be measured in years, not seconds. The course we chart today will determine whether those who follow us will get the chance to experience the freedom, security, and prosperity of an open Internet.

As we look ahead, let us remember that Internet freedom isn’t about any one particular activity online. It’s about ensuring that the Internet remains a space where activities of all kinds can take place, from grand, ground-breaking, historic campaigns to the small, ordinary acts that people engage in every day.

We want to keep the Iternet open for the protestor using social media to organize a march in Egypt; the college student emailing her family photos of her semester abroad; the lawyer in Vietnam blogging to expose corruption; the teenager in the United States who is bullied and finds words of support online; for the small business owner in Kenya using mobile banking to manage her profits; the philosopher in China reading academic journals for her dissertation; the scientist in Brazil sharing data in real time with colleagues overseas; and the billions and billions of interactions with the Internet every single day as people communicate with loved ones, follow the news, do their jobs, and participate in the debates shaping their world.

Internet freedom is about defending the space in which all these things occur so that it remains not just for the students here today, but your successors and all who come after you. This is one of the grand challenges of our time. We are engaged in a vigorous effort against those who we have always stood against, who wish to stifle and repress, to come forward with their version of reality and to accept none other. We enlist your help on behalf of this struggle. It’s a struggle for human rights, it’s a struggle for human freedom, and it’s a struggle for human dignity.

Thank you all very much.

“If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet,” Ghonim said in an interview with CNN.

Ghonim gives credit to the young Egyptians who organized themselves on Facebook, dating back to last June when activist Khaled Said was killed. Ghonim commented on how a video posted on Facebook (where he is administrator of a page commemorating Said) would be quickly shared by 50,000 people, calling Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg a personal hero.

Ghonim said he plans to write a book on the topic called “Revolution 2.0.”

Mubarak’s government had shut down much of Egyptian Internet access and SMS service for nearly a week during the protests, then made concessions to not run for another term, but protests only intensified until he finally agreed to step down today.

Should free and open communication—particularly free and open communication via the Internet—be considered an unalienable right? How much control should a government or Internet service provider wield over its citizens’ communications?

This is very much a global issue and, while it’s easy to say that every citizen should have “uncensored access” to the Internet, such a statement is too glib, and here’s why.

If we have learned anything in Internet security from the past 10 years, it’s that a completely open Internet can make it as difficult to communicate safely and effectively as a closed one. The past decade witnessed a meteoric rise of unwanted traffic in the form of spam and cybercrime, made possible through cheap and easy Internet connections. Should spammers engaged in mass-marketing (as well as other more nefarious activities) be able to communicate as freely and easily as Egyptian protestors? Where do we draw that line?

Second, while censorship is prominent in countries like Egypt and China, Americans face more subtle—but equally serious—concerns about the quality of our network access, with issues ranging from network neutrality to competition in access networks. Our government’s decisions affect our Internet access quality and speed. Six years ago the Supreme Court decided Internet service providers (ISPs) were under no obligation to lease their infrastructure to competing carriers. This has effectively created a near-monopoly for Internet access in many regions of the United States and left users either unable to exchange certain types of traffic (such as when Comcast blocked BitTorrent) or with flagging Internet speeds (such as when AT&T delayed its rollout of fiber to the home as part of its U-Verse offering).

Finally, even if citizens can access the Internet, they must also be able to verify information sources. It’s not just whether Facebook, Twitter or YouTube is blocked—it’s whether governments or other organizations are using such sites to spread propaganda.

All of these issues, both at home and abroad, revolve around one question: Who should be the Internet gatekeeper, and what rules should be applied at the gate? I believe the foundations of rights in the digital world rest on two pillars: transparency and choice. First, the actions of ISPs and governments should be transparent; if they take certain actions to restrict, throttle or otherwise manipulate communications or information, users must know about it. Second, users must be able to choose their ISP. If they do not like the performance or policies of a particular ISP, they should have the ability to switch providers.

Transparency is thornier than it appears. Because ISPs do not publicize the way they prioritize different kinds of traffic, we must reverse-engineer these practices with measurement tools. Even notions such as “Internet speed” are complicated and can’t be represented by a single number. Also, different users may be concerned with different performance metrics; gamers might be interested in network service that delivers traffic with the least amount of delay, while those who stream movies may care more about receiving a high quality signal with few errors.

At Georgia Tech we are working with the FCC to give consumers a better sense of whether they’re getting what they are paying for, in terms of ISP performance, and also to educate them on how they might coax better performance out of their home networks.

But in the end, transparency is only helpful if users can choose among Internet service providers. Unfortunately in the United States, users have very little choice. We must reconsider ways to make the ISP market more competitive, perhaps drawing on our own experiences in forcing competition among utility providers.

Though the events in Egypt seem far away, the central questions about information access are quite relevant here at home. Demanding that the ISP policies and behaviors be transparent—and providing users more choice in the ISPs they can use—helps ensure that everyone’s Internet is less vulnerable to the whims of a single gatekeeper.

Nick Feamster is an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech. His research focuses on many aspects of computer networking and networked systems, including the design, measurement, and analysis of network routing protocols, network operations and security, and anonymous communication systems. In 2010 he was recognized by Technology Review magazine as one of the world’s top innovators under the age of 35 for his research in computer networks, and he also received a Rising Star Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. Feamster is featured in the March 2011 issue of Discover magazine in a multi-page exploration of tomorrow’s Internet.

“I’m glad,” came the exhale, “the guy doesn’t work for us.”

Who wasn’t amazed at the power Mr. Ghonim wielded against the authoritarian regime of Hosni Mubarak? An Internet geek and Google’s Mideast regional marketing executive, Mr. Ghonim helped administer a group of Web pages that served as a rallying point for activists long before crowds gathered in Tahrir Square. He was detained by the police, made a martyr in the streets, and then released. A popular hero was born.

A lot of U.S. companies, which now manage millions of employees abroad, watched with trepidation. Many of them now earn more abroad than they do in America. And much of that income comes from the sale of big-ticket items—power systems, infrastructure equipment, aircraft, telecommunications—that only governments can afford to buy.

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The president flew to Michigan to deliver his remarks on the subject and saw a demonstration of WiMAX technology in use at Northern Michigan University.

Obama hopes to build this network with money raised from two key sources, thankfully neither involving any additional direct burden on taxpayers. First he’d like to make changes to the Universal Service Fund, which has historically been used to help connect remote and rural areas to the telephone network. Some $5 billion from that fund that currently goes to subsidize phones in rural areas will instead be put to work building wireless towers and other related infrastructure in places where such networks don’t yet exist. Police, firefighters and other emergency workers would get access to their own wireless network built with another $10 billion. Yet another $3 billion would go toward research and development on other ways to use wireless networks.

That’s almost $19 billion. Where will it come from? Spectrum auctions. The administration hopes to raise nearly $28 billion by re-auctioning some of the spectrum currently held by TV broadcasters but no longer actively used. (About $10 billion would go toward reducing the deficit.) The rub is that TV broadcasters are resisting pressure from the president and the Federal Communications Commission to voluntarily give that spectrum back. Under the plan being considered, broadcasters would get some portion of the proceeds from the auctions–no word yet on how much.

These give-backs are supposedly going to be voluntary, and one priority the National Association of Broadcasters hopes to see in this plan is a provision that allows broadcasters to opt out of the process without penalty. This suggests that the administration will get some spectrum back in some places, but not in others, creating the potential for a sort of inconsistent patchwork. More on the particulars of the plan here.

Building out the Internet is certainly a laudable goal. As I’ve written before, an Internet connection is now as essential to modern life as electric lights and running water. Places without adequate network coverage are essentially locked out of participating in the economic and cultural discourse that so many of us take for granted every day.

Consider for a moment how much of the recent political campaigns was conducted on the Web, and then ask yourself how well-informed a voter you’d be without relatively fast access to the Web day in and day out. As the Communications Workers of America pointed out in a recent study, roughly one American in three doesn’t have access to broadband at home; some choose not to have it, but other want it but can’t get it.

I thought about this a bit when I read that a new undersea fiber-optic Internet cable had been laid to improve access to the Internet in Cuba, courtesy of an international aid program paid for by Venezuela. As it stands right now, Internet connections there are handled via slow and cumbersome satellite links, and so only about three percent of the population has access to the Web. The new cable will allow connections 3,000 times faster than currently possible.

Say what you will about the ultimate political aims of Venezuela in financing the cable, or what controls the Cuban government will likely impose upon those who use it, but you can’t deny that any improvement in getting people in Cuba connected to the Internet is a good thing. Who knows what changes a better connection might bring?

Here my thoughts turn once again to Egypt and the changes unfolding there. During the past several weeks we’ve seen the power of the Internet brought to bear in Egypt, where what’s been widely called the Facebook Revolution seems on the cusp of toppling President Hosni Mubarak. It was Mubarak who shocked the world by cutting his country off from the Internet, and it so irritated people both inside and outside Egypt that they banded together to find ways around the digital curtain he tried to erect around his borders. The same chain of events has turned a humble Google marketing exec into a national hero.

It’s at moments like this that I’m struck by the immeasurable power of the Internet to be turned into a powerful force for good and for the empowerment of people in all walks of life, with better information, better communication, more economic choices. Without passing judgment on Obama’s proposal–it’s likely to spark a fight with congressional Republicans and with various constituencies in the broadcasting and telecom industries–it’s hard not to agree with his intent. It’s unfortunate that in 2011 the country that gave birth to the Internet hasn’t yet found a way to extend its many benefits to every sector of its population.

Here are a few highlights from the president’s speech today, courtesy of the Associated Press.

Here’s the video about “Cairo’s Facebook flat.” (I had to squish it to fit our column, but you can go here to see the original.)

Commentators have questioned how online social media could have played a significant role in a revolution in a country with only 20 percent Internet penetration. However, the flat residents, described as students and children of Cairo’s elite, give social media full credit.

“Facebook and Twitter is what started this revolution,” said Yusuf Bagato, an art student. “So it’s the most important element we have here. Most of the youth in Egypt have Facebook accounts, so it’s the easiest way to get to them.”

Here’s what appears to be the Tahrir Square Facebook page maintained by the group. The page has fewer than 2,000 registered fans, but lots of fresh content and activity.

Wael Ghonim, the recently freed Google executive who has become a hero in the Egyptian movement, is the administrator of another Facebook page called We are all Khaled Said. That page continues to be maintained and seems to have attracted a large international audience.

(Click on the “CC” button in the embedded video to see English subtitles, and if that doesn’t work try going directly to the YouTube page.)

Ghonim, who leads marketing for Google in the Middle East and North Africa, said in a later interview that he was the administrator of the Facebook page “We are all Khaled Said” (named after the young man killed by Egyptian police officers last year) that helped organize Egyptian youth.

Ghonim said he was blindfolded throughout his imprisonment but was not tortured. The Egyptian government did not confirm its role in Ghonim’s disappearance until yesterday.

Ghonim told an interviewer from the Egyptian channel Dream TV, “I tricked my employer so I could attend the protests in Egypt,” according to a translation.

Nearly 300 people have been killed in the protests. Ghonim urged viewers, “Please everybody, this is not a time to settle scores, this is a time to build our country.”

A cellphone recording of the second interview, sans subtitles, is here:

Video streaming by Ustream

“Freedom is a bless that deserves fighting for it.”

A Tweet by Wael Ghonim, Google’s head of marketing for the Middle East and North Africa who’s being called a hero of the uprising in Egypt upon his release by authorities there today. He disappeared more than a week ago.

Wael Ghonim, an Internet activist who has helped run social networking sites critical of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s government, has become a rallying symbol for the demonstrators demanding the resignation of the long-time president.

Mr. Ghonim was feared to be among the some 1,200 activists and demonstrators detained since the start of the protests on Jan. 25, according to human rights workers and political activists. However, since he disappeared on Jan. 28 there has been no information about his whereabouts.

“Wael is going to be released tomorrow at 4 p.m., several people from the authorities … called us to tell us,” Hazem Ghonim, Wael’s brother, said in a telephone interview from Cairo.

This provocative debate isn’t even being acknowledged in most American coverage of the Internet’s role in the current uprisings. The talking-head invocations of Twitter and Facebook instead take the form of implicit, simplistic Western chauvinism. How fabulous that two great American digital innovations can rescue the downtrodden, unwashed masses. That is indeed impressive if no one points out that, even in the case of the young and relatively wired populace of Egypt, only some 20 percent of those masses have Internet access.

– Frank Rich of The New York Times on the overhyped role that American social media companies have played in Egyptian unrest