Speaking to the Internet Governance Forum in Athens, the father of the Internet and Google employee Vint Cerf, said that imposing some censorship was necessary to prevent the Chinese government totally cutting off information to its population.

He said that Google preferred to provide as much information to the Chinese people as it could through the Google search engines.

While Google is self-censoring material which the China government tells it we are not to exhibit, there is still a large amount of information that was getting through that, if left to China, probably would not make it, he said.

A Microsoft spokesman said that state vigilance in China appeared to be strengthening and was almost at the point where the Chinese people are worse off for having the internet in their country. China told the conference that it could not work out what the other nations were banging on about. Yang Xiaokun, a Chinese government representative at the Athens forum said the country didn't censor the internet at all.

He said that people claim there are journalists in China that have been arrested but the country had hundreds of journalists in China and very few have been arrested. "But there are criminals in all societies and we have to arrest them. But these are legal problems. It has nothing to do with freedom of expression," Xiaokun said.

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