Do you agree with the Government censoring the Internet?

Ok as you know the Government has just recently passed a law that will allow the government to censor the Internet, and watch what people are doing. What will happen next will the Government watch our emails? Will they decide to affect how fast or slow the Internet can run? Will they even block certain sites that we can't visit? Do you think that this is an invasion of privacy and basic civil liberties? Alot of questions that need answering and though the future is always in motion as Yoda said one thing is clear we can choose that future and now........

/discuss

 

I'm fairly certain I'm being trolled, or that you're severely misinterpreting the new FCC guidelines, but I'll bite. Please PPOR.

 

I think he may be Australian, actually. Though for the record, if such mythical creatures do exist, I would say the Australian outback is probably the most likely place for them at this point.

 

I think I'll state, for the record, that if I see the word "government" without any context I, like most people who live in a specific nation, tend to assume the reference is to said specific nation's government. So... yeah, article or named names would have been nice, but whatever.

So, with apologies, I'll get to the topic at hand: No, I don't agree with an automatic internet filter for an entire country's population, and no, I do not think the OP's subject presentation is a fair characterization of the issue, although I feel we agree.

 

I mean, it's equally likely that he's just some Tea Partier. The OP is way too vague to tell. But I'm just trying to give the benefit of the doubt until there's some certainty.

 

Is it bad that, having not even read the Encyclopædia Dramatica article for Tea Partiers, I know I'm probably going to agree with it 100%?

BTW, I love that the lady behind the Birther conspiracy has "o rly?" in her name.

 

Don't most governments already read people's emails?
I remember the fuss that was caused when blackberry apparently had some system that meant governments couldn't hack emails people accessed via the phones.

As for blocking the internet, China already does that and we know what kind of regime they have there.

 

Oh Lord, let's just not, shall we?

 

Not sure why everyone dismisses this topic, it seems like a very real and current threat to me.

The end of net neutrality for the US?

 

I'd agree. There are a lot of issues in here. Privacy is I think a different issue from censorship, and censorship and regulation have to be sorted out from each other, although that's difficult.

And then there's the issue of the digital divide and access based on ability to pay, minority levels of participation, low income levels of participation in the benefits of the technology, educated vs. less educated, etc.

We all know and hope that the government will try to censor things like the peddling of child pornography and help protect the internet from crime and cyber warfare, promote regulation that protects the security of our private data and so on.

There's the issue of how much access the government should have to our data, but also how much private corporations should be allowed to track our online behavior.

Net neutrality is an interesting issue. Comcast provides my internet service and my television cable service. It pipes in the services of its own competitors now since things like VUDU and Netflix and even YouTube are direct competition to cable viewing and On Demand services.

At this point net neutrality gets bound up with the problems of monopolistic or near monopolistic service providers, very much reminding me of the years when local phone service providers first had to open up their lines to competing long distance providers.

Austria has different mobile phone and DSL/cable internet pricing models than the U.S. It's common there i think to pay different price levels for different levels of data access. Or at least last time I was there I bought a mobile internet card for a month of data with a finite access limit.

 

I can't tell you how pleased I am to read all these nuanced replies following the first post.

Ensuring that companies with virtual monopolies can't limit your access to content from what competition they may actually have is the polar opposite of censorship.

When will those on the far right learn to not fear the government giving them more options, which logically means more freedom? "Public option," anyone?

 

Well, here in Australia, the Govt will be rolling out the National Broadband Network and they plan to hook everyone up to fibre optics at a cost of $40Billion (Aust) and add a "watch filter" so that we don't surf any illegal sites. This will be a tax payer funded project and it is designed to monitor our movements on the internet.
It has been sold to the uneducated voters as delivering state-of-the-art speed but what they don't tell you is how they are able to control what you get to use the internet for. This is the Government's way of controlling the ISPs around the country.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/05/07/2893687.htm
What do think about this?
TK