With so much attention focused on online censorship in highly restrictive countries such as China, Iran and Syria, the discussion of global Internet freedom often has tended to exclude the large class of more moderate nations with rapidly growing online populations with only a rudimentary set of laws and policies for the Web.

Facebook has its sights on China, where the social media titan is blocked, but analysts say its chances of re-entering the market of half a billion internet users are slim.

U.S. companies are locating more of their research and development operations overseas, and Asian countries are rapidly increasing investments in their own science and technology economies, the National Science Board (NSB) reported this week.

The number of internet users in China has surged past 500 million as millions of new web surfers go online using mobile phones and tablet computers, an industry group reports.

Security was a big issue in 2011 with more sophisticated and a wider range of threats than ever before wasting even more of everyone's time at a cost of billions of dollars.

The relaunch of the popular online game World of Warcraft in China, where it has already been offline for six weeks, still faces an indefinite delay as it awaits government approval for its content.

China has started restoring some Internet access to a province where it was blocked after deadly ethnic riots two weeks ago, but the outage has already taken a toll on local businesses.

Microsoft's Bing search engine filters out some sensitive results from searches made in simplified Chinese, the script used to write the language in China, searches revealed Thursday.

An overwhelming majority of Web sites promoted through spam are hosted in China at service providers that many times choose to ignore complaints and allow illegal activity, according to research from the University of Alabama.

McAfee is expanding its staff in China amid a boom in the country's security market fueled by the launch of next-generation mobile networks.