"Many people have a false impression that the Chinese government fears the Internet. In fact it is just the opposite," the official, Qin Gang, explains. "China's Internet is open enough, but also needs to be regulated by law in order to prevent the spread of harmful information and for national security."

That second sentence -- you know, the one that contradicts the statement before it -- is key here. While China maintains appearances of being OK with an "open enough" network, "open enough" really means not open at all. The country's government has blocked YouTube . As recently as March, access to the site amid riots in Tibet, which just happened to be videotaped and uploaded prior to the blocking.

China's put the kibosh on countless other sites over the years, including Wikipedia, Flickr, and . Then there was it made prior to last year's Olympics: Read my lips. No Internet blocking. (For foreign journalists, anyway.) We saw .

The country's cracked down , told , and , citing nonexistent "technical problems" for the troubles. Heck, the government even kept power-blogger within the People's Republic. So what's the deal?

Murky Standards