Tell people something they know already, and they will thank you for it. Tell them something new, and they will hate you for it. (Monbiot.com)

'The democratic potential of the new media is being blocked by the companies providing the technology ', argues George Monbiot. Article published in the Guardian, 13th September 2005.

Monbiot takes the recent case of Shi Tao as a contemporary reference point to assess the degree to which New Media has 'democratized' the PRC in the past decade -> well..
. . . so much for the promise that the internet would liberate the oppressed. This theory was most clearly formulated in 1999, by the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. In his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Friedman argues that two great democratising forces — global communications and global finance — would sweep away any regime which was not open, transparent and democratic.

In his latest book the globalization guru argues that the playing field is being leveled - from Shanghai to Silicon Valley, from al Qaeda to Wal-Mart. Wired Magazine (May, 2005):
One reason for Friedman's influence is that, in the mid-'90s, he staked out the territory at the intersection of technology, financial markets, and world trade, which the foreign policy establishment, still focused on cruise missiles and throw weights, had largely ignored. "This thing called globalization," he says, "can explain more things in more ways than anything else."

. . . Rights & Democracy on the globalisation of surveillance (October, 2001)

While the proponents of economic globalization flaunt the terminology of "level playing fields" and "rules-based systems," millions of people in China live within a system of political control that affects every aspect of their daily lives. There is no level playing field without freedom. There is no "rules-based system" when rules govern only the commercial dimension of human interaction. There is no freedom when the State routinely violates fundamental human rights.
Monbiot has obviously read ONI's report - more importantly he actually gets it!

. . .a  study earlier this year by a group of scholars called the OpenNet Initiative revealed what no one had thought possible: that the Chinese government is succeeding in censoring the Net. Its most powerful tool is its control of the routers—the devices through which data is moved from one place to another. With the right filtering systems, these routers can block messages containing forbidden words. Human-rights groups allege that Western corporations—in particular Cisco Systems—have provided the technology and the expertise. Cisco is repeatedly cited by Thomas Friedman as one of the facilitators of his global revolution. "We had the dream that the Internet would free the world, that all the dictatorships would collapse," says Julien Pain of Reporters Without Borders. "We see it was just a dream."