In January 2010, I sat in an auditorium at the Newseum in Washington and heard Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proclaim that “the spread of information networks is forming a new nervous system for our planet.” Clinton announced that internet freedom would be a new pillar of U.S. diplomacy and that as a country, “we stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas.” She described access to global information networks as being like “an on-ramp to modernity” and argued that “even in authoritarian
