Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has recently announced that a new focus of American foreign policy will be an “open war” on authoritarian control of the internet, according to Aaron Church at The Heritage Foundation.

Google, the global internet giant, has been embroiled in a high-profile controversy over censorship of its online portals in China, and Secretary Clinton took the opportunity to stress the US position on internet freedom, continues The Heritage Foundation.

“New technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress, [but] the United States does,” Clinton asserted.

But some feel the State Department is not doing enough to combat the censorious practices of some regimes, especially Iran, says Ian Swanson at The Hill’s Hillicon Valley blog. Swanson writes that “a coalition of pro-democracy groups” sent Secretary Clinton a letter recently requesting more transparency for a series of State Department grants which aim at promoting internet freedom in Iran, adding that they should be allocated based on merit, not political biases.

Swanson remarks that a bipartisan coalition of five senators also sent a letter to Secretary Clinton, requesting that the funds be released in a timely manner, and that they will also consider awarding grants to “groups working outside the borders of authoritarian regimes such as Iran.”

Former US Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez praised the Secretary of State for “her staunch defense of internet freedom” in an opinion piece for The Detroit News. He stresses that the volatile and unprotected online environment created by the intense surveillance of dictatorial governments also has a negative economic impact.

“If companies feel their proprietary information is not safe [from state-sponsored hackers], they will not invest,” Gutierrez claims. “Economies will only continue to flourish in countries open to ideas from thought leaders in all nations.”

“An unfettered internet can be the world’s highway to freedom,” Gutierrez writes. However, he adds that freedom must be balanced with the issue of protecting personal privacy. “A tricky balance, but, when achieved, could help lead the world from these troubled times into a new age of peace and prosperity.”

Iman Kurdi of the Khaleej Times agrees that while intense filtering may not be the answer, “we need to take a more responsible approach to the privacy of others.” She points out that although most of the internet is free in many countries, users do not feel personally accountable for proliferating legal but ethically questionable material.

Ahmed Al-Omran, a well-known blogger in Saudi Arabia, told Fox News that even in his ultra-conservative country, internet censorship is proving to be unwieldy and ineffective. He says that although the government “sees the internet mostly as a threat,” huge numbers of young people are using the internet to voice their opinions on subjects and issues that they have never been able to address in a public forum.

Although Fox News highlights that Saudi Arabia is one of the most oppressive Arab regimes when it comes to freedom of speech, Al-Omran, who has received death threats and reprimands, is still optimistic.

“The government is finding that censorship just doesn’t work anymore,” Al-Omran said. “We’ve all become reporters without borders. The red lines of our society are slowly crumbling.”