Online Censorship

First of all, this is not the promised post about deployment issues for broadband in Ireland. I currently am working it, but it is a work in progress,and currently it is lengthy and unwieldy. And a lot of it takes the form of a rant and re-reading it feels badly written, so it is still ongoing.

Benjamin Franklin : 'They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety'.

This is my favourite quote in relation to civil rights and the need for security and revelant still today.

I would say hello to any potential readers in Turkey, but currently they can't read this, because like WordPress and YouTube, Blogger and Blogspot have now been blocked. According to all the reports I have been reading (many with disturbingly similar wording) this is all thanks to court actions by Adnan Oktar, who is the leading advocate of Muslim-Creationism (I was even aware of the movement). Normally I would take a fairly libertarian view of religion, and yes even though creationism is a science based on religion and not a religion itself, but schools in America is some instances are forced to teach creationism as well as the theory on evolution. (Old hat, and lets not start on the Christmas/Holidays issue). But internet monitoring and censorship is major issue in the way Internet will develop, in my opinion.

I do understand the need for some monitoring and restrictions on the net, particularly in cases of child abuse and porn. And I do believe that if it saves a few children from harmed and action against the people who do it then, I would support more restrictions on access.

The need for better monitoring of net for cases and illegal file as lead to the development of application that allows for "instantaneous conversion of infringing activity into legitimate content transactions". Basically the application will run on the ISP's server and if someone searches for illegally pirated files then the ISP will re-direct the customer to a file that will have the option to buy, the money will be charged by the ISP on their bill to the customer and a cut be given the owners of the file. This is currently being tested in Australia on an ISP. Also it will allow for better monitoring of the user's searches.

I can foresee many problems with this of model:

- the application needs to a list of files that are illegally pirated and correct link to redirect the users to. If the file is not listed, then it will have no effect.
- the ISP's will need to have a rock solid method of identifying users, this is currently not the case. But this may be fixed in the future with the deployment of IPv6.
- The owners of the material will have extra layers between them and consumer.
-Civil liberties are going crazy over it.

There has been speculation that the internet will be changing to type of cable TV style medium, where you pay for the sites that you want to access in advance, this type of technology would seem to supporting this idea. Personally I don't think that this model will ever come about, for the same reasons already listed, and people have gotten used to the internet in it's current format. But as I have always found especially with dealing with technology and people's reactions to it, that it is nigh on impossible to predict or plan for the way that people will react to it.