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"Save the internet"

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40hz:
@Ren - it's not so much a problem of SK being afraid. It's more a matter of some idiots with their fingers on buttons in other places being afraid - or deciding the time has finally come to make some financially insignificant and uppity spot on the globe one of those "horrible examples of what can happen to you if..." that gets written up in history books. Brinksmanship is a very dangerous game to play. Especially when you're exclusively playing it as an unreasonable, and frankly juvenile, bully.

Check out the movie Deterrence for a plausible scenario for how something like that could work. Last I looked, you could watch the entire thing for free here.
 :tellme:

(The ending is a total but completely believable surprise BTW.)

The Arab world has been provoked for a long time. They're not going down a path -- they're being forced down it.
-Renegade (January 07, 2012, 10:03 AM)
--- End quote ---

Hmm...their legitimate issues aside...I wonder. Are they really being "forced" down a path - or are they just talking themselves into taking the bait?

TaoPhoenix:
Latest news is that the lawmakers want to pas it anyway, despite opposition. We're getting close to pure evil here. "We in Congress don't care that individuals are against the law. We write laws for the companies that pay us."

Edit: I just thought of something. You know who we haven't heard from? President Obama! Isn't that the *Point* of the Presidency - to sign *or* veto a bill? So far we hear the lawmakers having a grand field day - what if it runs into President Obama's Veto Hammer?

IainB:
I just thought of something. You know who we haven't heard from? President Obama! Isn't that the *Point* of the Presidency - to sign *or* veto a bill? So far we hear the lawmakers having a grand field day - what if it runs into President Obama's Veto Hammer?
-TaoPhoenix (January 07, 2012, 01:26 PM)
--- End quote ---
Has Obama's performance to date indicated that he is more than likely to block anything that restricts individual freedoms/rights under the Constitution?
I would suggest that all you need to do to ensure that the proposed law change gets signed off is do nothing.
Easy.

Renegade:
The Arab world has been provoked for a long time. They're not going down a path -- they're being forced down it.
-Renegade (January 07, 2012, 10:03 AM)
--- End quote ---

Hmm...their legitimate issues aside...I wonder. Are they really being "forced" down a path - or are they just talking themselves into taking the bait?
-40hz (January 07, 2012, 11:39 AM)
--- End quote ---

Interesting point. I'm not sure there's too much of a difference though. The net effect seems to be the same. I might be missing something though. I've not really considered the different angles there much. 

IainB:
Well, whether they were "forced down a path or chose to take it" could seem to be a subject of opinion and in any event could arguably be largely irrelevant in the context of the Iranian CUG/Intranet.

What I find interesting is that:
(a) The Iranian proposal would seem to be entirely consistent with Islamic teachings/belief (as above). (Come to think of it - though I could be wrong, of course - I don't recall ever having seen the Iranians to be inconsistent in any of their actions or proclamations/declarations.)

(b) If the infection is considered to be Western religio-political ideology in general, and if one of the main vectors for carrying that infection is the Internet, then the sensible thing could be to quarantine the vector - the Internet. That is presumably precisely what a national Iranian CUG (Closed User Group) Intranet could achieve.

Whether it is a practical approach, I wouldn't know. For example, it would presumably have been the sort of approach that the Chinese, Pakistani and Indian governments could have considered - and maybe they did and later abandoned for a variety of reasons (the biggest maybe being the risk of subjecting themselves to cultural-isolation).
But if all Islamic theocracies/nations were to do the same as the Iranian proposal, then they could form a common Islamic Caliphate CUG INTERNET, and that just might have enough mass/momentum so as to be a workable proposition. I think the concept would need to be tested out in prototype before you could be certain though. Maybe Iran's CUG proposal is a prototype for all members of the OIC/Muslim Brotherhood?

The orthodox Islamic approach is that it is forbidden - it is an offence - for kafirs (e.g., Christians - who are part of the world of heresy or "Dar al-Harb") to proselytise or seek to convert Muslims to their faith. The offence could be punishable by death. That is probably the reason behind the various reports of Christian churches being torched and Christians being killed and Christian refugees fleeing in Egypt's "Arab Spring" revolution.

Thus, by the same token, if offensive/blasphemous Western ideological paradigms/beliefs are infecting Iranian Internet users, then severing publicly-accessible connections to the WWW/Internet could be the logical thing to do. One advantage would be that nobody gets killed in that action - which is arguably a more peaceful approach than making death threats for publication of Internet media/content that is deemed to be offensive (if not blasphemous) to Muslim beliefs.

So Iran could get what they need/want. And this would not destroy the Internet - so it is still "saved" - but it would change it in a way that the original designers possibly could not have foreseen and certainly away from the early CERN-inspired concept of universal, common, "open" and "free" sharing and access of all scientific information/knowledge.

Maybe this case indicates that 2012 is going to be a very interesting year, but I suspect that, at this rate (by locking up human knowledge), it will not see us getting any closer to the mythical ideal of the three Atlantean Halls of Record that Cayce spoke of. (Sigh.)

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