Critics have accused President Obama of kowtowing to Chinese leaders, by failing to meet dissidents, toning down his criticisms and delaying a meeting with the Dalai Lama. On balance, I think that criticism is premature: Confrontation doesn’t help with China and can hurt, and so engagement becomes a fine line to navigate. The Obama visit wasn’t a ringing success, but neither was it a craven embarrassment. For the latest craven kowtowing, we can look somewhere else: Microsoft and its new search engine, Bing. Western corporations have often behaved embarrassingly in China, sacrificing any principles to ingratiate themselves with the Communist Party authorities. Yahoo was the worst, handing over information about several email account holders so that they could be arrested – and then dissembling and defending its monstrous conduct. Now Microsoft is sacrificing the integrity of Bing searches so as to cozy up to State Security in Beijing. In effect, it has chosen become part of the Communist Party’s propaganda apparatus.

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (AFP) - China on Wednesday called for the abolition of the UN's Internet Governance Forum, blasting it as a powerless gathering where IT heavyweight countries dominate. "Without any reforms to the IGF, it is not necessary to give it a five year extension," Chen Yin, head of the Chinese delegation, told the forum's fourth conference which wrapped up in the Egyptian resort of Sharm El-Sheikh. Other participants including the United States, Japan and the European Union backed a extension of the IGF's mandate. The UN Secretary General will decide whether to grant the five-year extension after he receives written submissions from delegates.

An online tool that maps incidents of government suppression against bloggers and social media users called Threatened Voices launched November 3. The Web site, a project of free expression advocacy organization Global Advocacy Voices, provides information on incident locations and offers details about the blogger or social media user involved. Visitors to the site initially view a world map with red dots, varying in size and associated with a specific country, indicating incidents of suppression. As of November 9, China, Iran and Egypt claimed the greatest number of recorded incidents and, thus, the largest dots. China, with 34 documented incidents, is the foremost oppressor. Below the map, a timeline offers specific information on incidents, and colored labels represent the status of the blogger or social media user. Bloggers are categorized as: under arrest, threatened, deceased, released, or unknown.

SHARM EL-SHEIK, Egypt - United Nations officials forced free-speech advocates to take down a poster over its reference to China's Web restrictions at an Internet conference focused on freedom, saying Monday that it violated a ban on posters at events organized by the world body. The OpenNet Initiative, which focuses on Internet freedom around the world, had placed a banner at the Internet Governance Forum mentioning China's censorship of the Web. U.N. officials said an unnamed delegation objected to the poster, and others objected to another flier from the group also relating to China. "We have a no poster policy, be they commercial or political," Markus Kummer, the forum secretariat's executive coordinator, told The Associated Press. He said the OpenNet Initiative had been granted a meeting room after officials were unable to accommodate their late request for an exhibition booth at the forum.