Sure, but I see some pattern here. The country that started international networking is the same country that tries to restrict it worldwide.
What, if not silly, is this? As if the USA were some world police. Bah.
Yes, and it is a quite self-evident pattern that I appreciated immediately when I read the opening post for this thread.
What also immediately occurred to me was that the
people that started the Internet were probably quite a different breed of cat to the people who seem to be busy gleefully dismantling it today, and who appear to be mounting a concerted attack on the Internet,
for good reason.From what comments I have read on this subject in the news and on blogs, the latter group of people form an apparently amorphous collection of different religio-political ideologies and just
happen to have a common vector ("common ground") in some of their otherwise conflicting objectives and which pertain to this subject. Their actions seem to be deliberately destructive, and driven by various ideologies of what is variously termed economic-totalitarian Socialism-Fascism and Capitalist-Fascism. I can't think of an appropriate collective noun for creatures such as these unless it is "wealth destroyers".
The sad thing for me is that all this destruction of something - a thing that
enables freedom in a very real sense - is being done under the watchful eye of an apparently complicit (and thus arguably corrupt) government administration/executive. Would this mean that the latter are another collection of wealth destroyers? Their actions would seem to answer the question.
Oh, and nobody seems to care much about protecting the American Constitution anymore.
It has been revealed (e.g.,
here)) that Spain had its arm twisted by the US government to introduce SOPA-like rules, "or else" (QED), and mysteriously other countries are starting to do the same, presumably encouraged down this path in the same manner, and likely to incur the wrath of the US where they do not comply - Switzerland seems to be a case in point (e.g.,
here). And EMI is suing the Irish Government for
NOT passing a SOPA-like censorship law (e.g.,
here).
When the Internet was implemented and I started using it in the '90s I had thought that the genie of universal freedom of, and access to information was out of the box at last. I reckoned it was a tremendous gift to all mankind, and that it had slipped right past the wealth destroyers.
Then the wealth creators got busy and expanded the uses that the network could be put to - including, for example:- without asking the users (who are obliged to pay for the bandwidth used to deliver the advertising to their desktops), they flooded the Internet with unsolicited commercial advertising;
- they used the Internet as a sort of TV entertainment medium funded by commercial broadcasting;
- they realised the potential for a virtually free B2B and C2B transaction processing network;
- they realised the potential for a virtually free EDI (Electronic Document Interchange) processing network;
- they built on the concepts of P2P media to develop commercially-driven user messaging communities - AIM, Yahoo, MSN Messenger, ICQ, etc.
- they created the concept of Google, which is now ubiquitous and is arguably one of the most creative developments that have taken place since the creation of the Internet.
- but the original freedoms of the Internet were largely undiminished, and possibly even expanded.
However, there is too much freedom now, and
IT MUST BE STOPPED - either to satisfy commercial lobbyists (e.g. as in SOPA), or to satisfy other, more totalitarian lobbies, where the dogma is generally that
"it is for the greater good".And it is being stopped. Incrementally, and bit-by-bit.
For example, in Australasia: (and these are general details from memory)
- I gather that the Australian and New Zealand governments have introduced State controls over, and access to, and State censorship of the public Internet, in a clampdown to catch and punish the publishers/users of child pornography. I am not suggesting that this is a bad thing per se, but it is a bad thing as a restriction of freedom and an invasion of privacy, and it is also the thin end of a potentially very large wedge.
- Currently, if you want to get an email account with one of the major ISPs in New Zealand, you are apparently obliged to agree to a condition that says that you accept that your email account will be accessible by and subject to censorship/review. No agreement? Then no email account.
- In New Zealand in 2011 they introduced a "DRM protection" law that obliges the country's ISPs to provide monthly transaction logs to the RIAA, who then scan the logs to identify IP addresses that have potential/actual pirate downloading. The IP addresses involved are detailed to the relevant ISPs, who must then send out warning letters to the owners of those IP addresses - I gather that it is three accumulated warning letters and you are "out", with automatic disconnection and up to $15,000 in penalty fines. (Not sure who keeps the loot.)
"Coming soon, to a domain near you."
It's all probably just
"Another brick in the wall", as per the songs in the Pink Floyd rock opera (
"The Wall") - which, coincidentally was a protest about totalitarianism, but in the schooling system.
