The Chinese, as befits a Communist autocracy, approached the task of dominating the Olympics with top-down military discipline.

The notion of 'world leadership' is a curiously archaic one. The very phrase is redolent of Kipling ballads and James Bondian adventures. What makes a country a world leader? Is it population, in which case India is on course to top the charts, overtaking China as the world's most populous country by 2034?

If China wants to build a new six-lane expressway, it can bulldoze its way past any number of villages in its path; in India, if you want to widen a two-lane road, you could be tied up in court for a dozen years over compensation entitlements.

Whereas China has set about systematically striving for Olympic success since it re-entered global competition after years of isolation, India has remained complacent about its lack of sporting prowess.

We are living, we have long been told, in the Information Age. Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us.

I've talked a lot about the need to promote digital empowerment: to enable any American who wants high-speed Internet access, or broadband, to get it.

If we can put a man on the moon and sequence the human genome, we should be able to devise something close to a universal digital public library.

Content zips around the Internet thanks to code - programming code. And code is subject to intellectual property laws.