"I don’t think that a [rule] that said you shouldn’t do business in some place whose standards aren’t identical to the US would work," says Bill Gates in an interview with Richard Waters of The Financial Times.

Gates asserted that his company would only remove blogs from the internet if provided with a government order to that effect.

When asked, Should the US government establish guidelines to regulate how internet companies deal with censorship in countries like China?

Gates responded: "I don’t think that a [rule] that said you shouldn’t do business in some place whose standards aren’t identical to the US would work. Clearly people like ourselves are glad to go along with whatever reasonable things gets laid down. That’s why its part of the dialogue. The internet overwhelmingly makes information available. It is not possible to block information, it is just not. You can make it so that the average person who just clicks on popular websites, with no extra effort, certain things don’t show up there. But in terms of actually blocking information… It’s very hard to do blocking … particularly if you put something up that says, we took this thing down, think of the time period between when you put it up and when it comes down and how people can cache that … It’s so night and day versus when newspaper publishers and TV owners were small chokepoints that controlled the distribution of information. So, I think people have to [understand] what a open tool the internet is."

Gates also explained that Microsoft has no servers inside China.

Finally, he stated that Microsoft is "not involved in self censorship", and when blogs are taken down, the company is simply 'following orders'.

Source: Financial Times