Will the internet be censored by the Government in 2012?

Lars Hilse — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:44:47 +0000

Depending on what you are more worried about, I would – in that context – like to point out that information is the most valuable good the world economy relies on today.
I always get a smile on my face when I hear people screeming that some social network has shared their data in some way. Or spied on them. Yet on the other hand the same people are clueless about all the information being collected about them through their shopping behaviour, their credit score, their behaviour while surfing the web (yes, ISPs are in most countries forced to record that – not without a reason), etc.
In Germany the next step will be that the personal ID card will be equipped with a PIN which has to be entered whenever you buy something on the internet. The proclaimed reason by the corporate media is, that it would make online trade safer. And ideed it does, but it also makes every purchase transparent, thus giving your personal preference away and you make yourself auditable quite easily.
What I wanted to point out with the example above is that – like always – there are pros and cons. So do I trust a Chinese government to determine which content is available to me? Or is a western, more or less democratic government the better choice? None of them are. In the good old days of the internet there were the lone gunmen, usually referred to as hackers. If inappropriate or even illegal content would pop up somewhere on the web, they would hack the site, destroy the content and be gone. Today, these people have be discrimited and criminalized, are hunted down by the governments we entrust to run, yes to even control the internet, and – above that – are proclaimed to be the evil of the internet which certainly a wide scope of them is not. The only information source left to mankind that has – at least not on a massive scale – not been undercut by the corporate media pools and where sharing knowledge through blogs etc. is not or only minorly controlled is left in the hands of those that we have chosen to be our leaders. Perhaps we should start to dig for the root of evil?

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Will the internet be censored by the Government in 2012?