"Difficult Problem with China"

President Obama answered questions today at the Business Roundtable and he used a diplomatic term that means things are not going well on cyber discussions between the two countries.  He said these issues were "difficult".  He was very general in the discussion, mentioning that we had difficulty discouraging the Chinese from stealing intellectual property from the U.S. and deterring them from other similar activities.  We all know that;  the Chinese know that.  The diplomatic meaning is almost always - don't hold your breath on anything coming out of this meeting, because we don't agree on how to get an agreement on behavior of one country to another in how they use the Internet.  It is too hard to do right now.

I don't think he responded to the question being asked, which he is allowed to do since he has the stage.  Some of his other answers seen to indicate he believes we can help the Chinese do a better job of being a good public citizen on the Internet.  Since the Chinese have not changed very much in the past 500 years, the protocols of another, smaller country are not going to matter to them very much.  We can't lecture them on how they should act.  We can criticize them for not behaving like other countries, but lecturing a country with this much history is pointless.  Persuading them that they need a more open Internet and internal communications flies in the face of their censorship and Internet controls.  We can provide a better deterrence by helping the citizens of China to work around their own censorship and communicate with like minded people of the world.