22/03/2009

The Death of the Internet?

With Acta, and quite a few national restrictions and censors of the Internet you have to ask yourself: When does the Internet stop being the Internet?
What defines the Internet in the first place, you might ask yourself. I'd have to say the diversity of it myself. No matter what your opinion you can find people who agree and disagree, questions, doubts, information, and more about whatever you want.
Then there's sex. Any fetish, no matter how deviant and absurd can be found online. You can even find a video of a monkey trying to hump a goat on YouTube if you so wish. Well, you could yesterday anyway.
Not that all of it is good of course. Absolute freedom isn't possible, since others will abuse that freedom by abusing others.
But the Internet is still pretty damned close.
The things you think might be illegal, like snuff, pedophilia, and so on, can be reported to various organizations that have contact with the police and will report it for you.
People masturbating with their own feces doesn't count, no matter how much it might offend you.

But back to the censorship and attempts at control then.
There's of course Acta that's looking kinda like an a attempt at a global copyright law to me. The secrecy is the worst part of it though, since no one except a few select politicians know what it actually says. Yey democracy and transparency in government, ey?
Then there's FRA in Sweden. Monitoring connections going to and from Sweden. Which effectively means almost all connections in Sweden as well. Connections don't go directly from you to your friend, or whoever/whatever you're in contact with. It goes the roundabout way, so I guess you could say that FRA affects the whole of Scandinavia to some extent.

Then there's the Great Australian Firewall, called so after the Great Chinese Firewall.
What the problem here then? True, it is a opt-out system, but from what I've heard the people pusing for it have all but said "If you're not with us you're with the pedophiles!" Very nice and democratic of them. Fuckers.
I sorta want to move to Australia and opt-out of the system, then I'd sue them for slander. Probably wouldn't stick, but it's the principal that matters. It's either that or punch them in the face, and that'd be bad considering that they're political figures.
Oh, and they've censored Wikileaks, which is considered something of a goldmine when it comes to publicizing all kinds of documents and information. It mostly has to do with governments and big coporations.
They were apprently censored for posting a list of sites blocked by the Dutch goverment. Again, go democracy! How about just blocking the sites in question instead? Too much work?
Oh, and it isn't really opt-out, you're just moved to "watered down version of the blacklist". Sure, all of the content on that list is considered illegal in Australia, but that includes "advocacy of euthanaisa", so who knows? "Indecent content" doesn't seem quite specific enough, and that just the censorship in itself.
I'd recommend reading more on Computer World, who seems to have most info on what's going on, what it's consequences will be, and so on.

Edit: Forgot to mention Ipred. It's more or less the European Unions own Acta. Not sure if it's the same thing, but it seems possible.

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