Internet censorship is carried out in a blanket fashion

Unlikely. When the New York Times website was blocked in China in October after publishing an article on the $2.7 billion amassed by the family of then-Premier Wen Jiabao, the online chatter was uncertain as to what actually happened. This kind of confusion often occurs in discussions of China's Internet blocks because the censorship employs a variety of different methods. These include connection resetting (which returns an error message that usually occurs when a site is down or has moved to a different address); redirection to China (typing in Skype.com from within China will take you to Skype.tom.com, its local partner which is subject to Chinese regulations); DNS poisoning (wherein the Internet service provider changes the DNS record of the blocked site, taking one to a dummy web server hosting a block page, which could contain malware); throttling (severely slowing down a site in lieu of blocking it outright, often done to Gmail in China); and timing out (when the site tries to load for so long that the browser gives up; indistinguishable from a genuine technical problem).

5. The Internet will lead to democracy.

Dream on. In his 2007 book The China Fantasy, journalist James Mann devoted an entire chapter to refuting an idea he called "The Starbucks Fallacy" -- the belief among Westerners that exposure to icons of Western capitalism like Starbucks and McDonald's would inevitably lead to democracy.

Today, post-Arab Spring, we might be in the middle of a Facebook Fallacy. After the resignation of Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, activist and Google executive Wael Ghonim said, "If you want to liberate a society just give them the Internet." But the Internet is not enough in the absence of the right political, social, and economic factors. And tools of free speech can be tools of surveillance.