Southeast Asia is a really interesting case study for me when it comes to political ideals vs. optimizing for life situations. There's a growing creep of authoritarianism in different nations -- given what we know of the military regime in Thailand and their propensity to arrest people for expression, it would be somewhat ironic to preach for the "open Internet" while living there. The tradeoff, of course, is much lower costs, higher security as others have pointed out. But I do wonder about the greater costs involved -- those perhaps not weighed on foreign workers, of accepting that this is the way things happen to be there.