John Battelle will interview Vint Cerf, the "father of the internet" and now employed by Google as "Chief Internet Evangelist." Battelle is asking his readers to suggest questions for the interview. Here are mine:

Vint, you've been outspoken on the topic of internet censorship. You wrote the foreword to the 2003 report on internet censorship from Reporters Without Borders (before you joined Google), and consistently argued that the antidote to government censorship is the critical thinking of users. But censorship is no longer being done just by governments, it is now implemented by the giant internet companies that *are* the internet for most people. John Gilmore famously said, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." How can the net "route around" censorship when the big internet companies themselves are the censors?

Now you're "Chief Internet Evangelist" for Google, which has been widely criticized for compromising their principles to develop an efficient system to self-censor political expression on a massive scale. Although Google seemed to be conflicted about their decision, and is arguably the most principled of the big Net companies, they still employed scarce engineering talent to develop the censorship technology that you've argued against. Is it possible for a company like Google to succeed without compromising their principles?

Vint, you've argued that the net is like a blank sheet of paper, in that it doesn't care what is written on it. Is this really still true, now that the companies that provide the bandwidth, routers, blogs, email, news and search have incorporated massive and efficient censorship systems directly into their products?

You've never been afraid to express your honest opinion, and I'd expect nothing less from you now, even though you're employed by Google. Were you consulted on Google's decision to censor news and search results, and if so, what was your advice? Do you believe that in Google's case that the ends justify the means -- that engaging with the Chinese government will eventually eliminate the need for censorship, but that developing censorship technology today was the price of that engagement?