In 1981 computer scientist Jon Postel established a key orgizational principle of the Internet. It has since come to be known as "The Robustness Principle" or "Postel's Law:"

Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.

Or, be more forgiving of others than you require others to be of you. If a developer was writing software for a hub, he or she would try to observe this rule. The result was a system that smoothly passed along information most of the time.

Postel's law is another restatement of The Golden Rule. This ethic has guided people of good will since the beginning of history.

Its certainly worked well for the Internet. Openess grew the network. And since "the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users" (Metcalfe's law), the Internet was able to stomp competing networks. CompuServe who?

The success of the Internet over other less open systems gives me hope that openess will continue to dominate the world.

This week China is trying to show the world that it has come of age. Not quite. China continues to fear the freedom of its own people. It needs to stop jailing dissidents and hold elections.

China is a country at a crossroads. It could decide that Olympic success was the result of central planning, or it could decide that the increased freedom of the last few years created the conditions that made it possible. Let's hope they choose Postel and Metcalfe over Lenin and Mao.