Uncertainty colours US public's views on internet censorship

Net Results: So, concerns about housing costs rank second only to frustrations with traffic. Some 40 per cent of people also say they have considered moving away from the area, and 70 per cent of those say the main reason they would move is the cost of a home.

Dublin? Well, no. The location is Silicon Valley, one of the only places that puts Dublin housing woes in perspective. The cost of an average family home in the region is now $628,000 (€524,000), well above the Dublin average price of €376,000.

Traffic, however, is another matter. Having driven this morning from near Stanford University to Sun Microsystem's headquarters along San Francisco Bay, a distance of about six miles, I can report that Bay Area people know not of what they complain.

I allowed myself 45 minutes to do this drive - given that I was leaving my parents' house at 7:45am, prime commute time - and even then (being used to Dublin traffic) I was concerned that I might be late.

Instead, I completed the journey in 20 minutes, and had to sit in the car listening to the morning news to pass the time until my 8:30 appointment.

Yes, I know this wasn't the freeways and I am aware those do back up horrendously because, over the years, I've been there, done that.

When I last lived out here, I made a thrice-weekly commute from San Francisco to San Jose, a distance of 55 miles each way, and woe betide me in the morning if I didn't get through Cupertino on Highway 280 before Apple's employees clogged the thoroughfare. But this was an easy zip across town, of the type you can only do in Dublin at 6am these days.

Cooling my heels in a lobby at Sun, I enjoyed the Monday morning tradition of hating the Valley technology executives listed in the San Jose Mercury News's weekly Insider Trading column. Here, all those normal folk worried about making their mortgage payments on their average-priced home are regaled with a list of tech executives that have made the largest net gains from stock trades in a recent one-week period.

The listings are a reminder that while the industry as a whole may have had a rough ride in the past half decade, some individuals have been lining their pockets quite nicely, thank you.

Read 'em and weep. Top of the list this particular Monday was Apple's Avadis Tevanian who made the tidy sum of $20,048,675 in one day. Next on the roster comes Adobe director Robert Burgess with $14,126,408. Executives from Trident Microsystems, Leadis Technology, eBay and Dionex also pocketed multiple millions, with the smallest amount in the Top Ten Trades listing amounting to $2,036,000 (for Dionex director A Blaine Bowman).

I'm not sure if the weekly column functions more as an inspiration for tech entrepreneurs, or an annoyance to executives whose mammoth-scale financial dealings come under such public scrutiny over Monday morning lattes all across the Valley. Probably a bit of both.

As for other types of scrutiny, the American public is fairly well split on whether it was wrong for companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Cisco to take an active role in censoring what the Chinese see on the internet.

A survey released this week by the Ponemon Institute, a Michigan think tank, shows that around 47 per cent of just over 1,000 respondents believe companies shouldn't allow this type of censorship. Another 40 per cent thought it was okay. And 13 per cent weren't sure.

A large majority - 76 per cent - thought that Congress shouldn't create laws that forbid companies from complying with another government's demands to censor content offered on the web, something some US lawmakers proposed after hearings in February on the censorship issue.

Another 54 per cent felt it was preferable for the Chinese to have access to the range of information provided on the internet even if some of it was censored - which some may recall was Google's defence of its actions.

However, the goose and the gander apparently get very different sauces. Another survey, by the University of Connecticut's Center for Survey Research and Analysis, showed that 65 per cent of respondents opposed the US government intervening with net activities of US citizens; in this case, monitor what they look for on search engines. Half feel that companies shouldn't be forced to hand over such information (although half consider this to be fine).

This general topic has also been in the news following Google's refusal to hand over the search data on random Americans to federal authorities. The US government says it wants the information to help pinpoint child pornographers.

At first glance, the results from both surveys seem curious for a nation that is meant to be so determinedly pro-democracy. But actually, they reflect the uncertainty many Americans feel on such issues at the moment.

Security v scrutiny, censorship v market access, free thinking v free trade - most feel more comfortable with a middle ground between the extremes.

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