I just read a troubling article that points towards a brave new internet future in Canada. An internet future that includes the private sector ‘deciding’ what internet content ‘may be potentially illegal’ and arbitrarily blocking those sites in secret.

Our courts and laws should decide what is illegal and our law enforcement should handle these things. This is just another path to censorship by our corporate masters…

First, they want to limit the internet based on ‘prioritization’ scheme (getting rid of the notion of net neutrality). The term ‘Internet neutrality’, simply put, means that internet traffic priority is the same for any site on the internet. If I go to a major commercial site or to a home grown political activist site, the speed will be the same. Big Brother wants this to stop, so that small independent sites would run as the least preferred on the network, slowing them down, and whatever commercial sites paid for ‘premium service’ would be fast and more available…

This would provide a situation where major corporations could ensure that their web store is more available than their competitors. This is predatory and would leverage the internet to ensure that those companies with big dollars to spend, would guarantee that they are accessible, squeezing out many smaller more niche competitors. This eliminates competition, reduces choices in the marketplace, and increases prices of items and services to consumers.

Ensuring the neutrality of internet traffic ensures that those with money cannot censor those who have little money by denying or limiting availability of information.

One of the other approaches to blocking speech is to put a firewall (much like what China has done) to facilitate and empower internet providers to make choices about content and block content that they feel is inappropriate or potentially illegal or simply threatening.

This is a very active process that is subjective and subject to the interpretation of regular people without recourse. If I say something, in this blog for example, that upsets someone, they may call a hotline to have me blocked. A technician may read my page and decide that I may be slandering the person so he blocks the site without any recourse. As a maintainer of a site, I may never find out even who blocked me and for what reason. That same technician may block the site without even reading it. I think this level of arbitrary blocking of internet content is detrimental.

The worst part of all of this is that it is being done in the guise of protecting the children, and others against child pornography and other very worthy causes. The effect of this is a built in chilling effect against anyone who is against censorship.

If you speak out against censorship in this case, you are branded a pedophile or a child porn trafficker or worse by your peers. This just shows how short sighted and ignorant corporate interests think normal people are. This shows the desire of those in wealthy situations to foster a type of serfdom of easily deceived and shortsighted peasants who will act in a particular way when fed information formatted to confuse and confound them. Decent people must not loose sight of the big picture if they want to be free of this kind of long-term manipulation.

Anyway, read the article Here

This entry was posted on Friday, November 24th, 2006 at 12:46 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.