...ACTA looked the same way until protesters in Europe buried it in a matter of weeks.
-Vurbal
Yes, but, like hydra that seems to be rising again. The potential "Internet freedom killers" are remorseless and, like rust, never seem to sleep - plus, they are apparently extremely well-organised, despising of democracy, powerful and highly motivated.
I'm not sure whether Internet freedomnicks are up to it for the long haul - whether they have the stamina or motivation, or even really understand/care all that much about what is going on.
Would loss of Internet freedoms really be so bad? "Freedom" is, after all, just something that can be likened to a feel-good concept that people have been taught to believe is their natural right, and we know that a "belief" is an irrational thing. They could easily unlearn that if they become sufficiently fatigued by the battle and its creeping, incremental erosion of individual/democratic freedoms predicated on "for the sake of the good of the many", or something. There could be some sense of security, after all, in benevolent collective enslavement to what seems to be a form of state corporatism - a sense of all being the same and having a trust in the masters. Most Western democracies and many other nation states have arguably already gone, or are going through this process, which is apparently being spearheaded by the US.
-IainB
Of course its rising again. For starters, defeating ACTA, was a single battle in a larger war. Additionally, once this war is over,it's just on to the next. As I've said many times before, that's just the normal care and feeding of democracy. The price of freedom really is eternal vigilance, certainly against outside threats, but even more so to protect us from our own inherent weaknesses.
Fundamentally, what we're experiencing today is almost identical to what the British colonists went through leading up to the American Revolution. It's cosmetically different, due to the fact our 'colonies' are purely economically based, due purely to the nature of modern economics. However, in every way that counts, this is a revolution against the power elite in the US.
Unfortunately, the majority of the US population doesn't recognize it. Those of us who do simply have to rely on the rest of the world, particularly in Europe, but also in Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, and a handful of other countries, to do most of the heavy lifting. All I can really do in this case is to help people like you stay informed, and also to assure you that it does make a difference - no matter how well the enemy hides it - especially from themselves.
