Freedom on the Internet was nice while it lasted.

[Qwubble]

Damn my 3 years of debate >.> (I'm trying not to bring any other debatable topics into this)

1) The government in NO WAY can regulate what we do on the internet. It can't even regulate child porn, so it can't add more to it. If they do take away our "internet freedoms," it just won't really happen.

2) What if someone else uses my computer? In courts right now, computers don't stand alone in court, and they never will. They just can't prove who was using that computer. For instance, my brother uses my computer and downloads his games that I don't want. It's the same kind of thing.

3) There's many larger problems then internet safety that the government cares about. Yes maby some government officials think it's a good idea. Yes maby there will be a large group of supporters. But congress doesn't want the burden of more useless spending.

Our loss of internet freedom won't be for several years :)

[jean-luc]

1) The government in NO WAY can regulate what we do on the internet. It can't even regulate child porn, so it can't add more to it. If they do take away our "internet freedoms," it just won't really happen.

Many countries already successfully operate massive internet censorship operations. China and Iran have perhaps the most effective and widespread filtering systems. see the book Access Denied, a report from the Open Net Initiative (2008, MIT Press) which details state-mandated internet censorship. It would be simple and fairly inexpensive to implement such a program.

2) What if someone else uses my computer? In courts right now, computers don't stand alone in court, and they never will. They just can't prove who was using that computer. For instance, my brother uses my computer and downloads his games that I don't want. It's the same kind of thing.

Although this is a logical refutation, courts haven't listened to it. the United States Supreme Court has set the precedent that IP addresses are not acceptable primary evidence, but nonetheless US courts convict people based almost entirely on IP addresses. Besides, the US supreme court has in the past set a precedent that as a computer owner, you are responsible for the use of the computer, regardless of who is using it.

3) There's many larger problems then internet safety that the government cares about. Yes maby some government officials think it's a good idea. Yes maby there will be a large group of supporters. But congress doesn't want the burden of more useless spending.

Ah, but this isn't useless spending. it's defending intellectual property and protecting the children. Intellectual property is a very profitable venture - groups with vested interests in IP enforcement like the RIAA, MPAA, and BSA make very substantial campaign contributions. Protecting the children is a universal banner that everyone likes - making it appear that you're legislating to protect the children makes a fast, cheap, and easy way to win significant quantities of votes. And, as I mentioned earlier, implementing an Iran-style filtering scheme wouldn't be very expensive at all, because they could compel ISPs to do the filtering (and pay for it).
Sure, there are larger issues, but 'internet safety' and 'IP enforcement' are two topics that are very profitable, both money-wise and vote-wise. Governments are driven by votes and money, not what's best for the country.

[scythe]

Pfft.
My old high school had one of the most high-priced proxy-filtering systems on the market. I made a list over a hundred sites long of how many porn sites I could get to without even using SOCKS. However, it blocked many useful sites, including Wikipedia. I don't want to live in any country that bans Wikipedia.
You cannot effectively censor the Internet without ruining it.
And that's a good thing.

[blue_tetris]

Pfft.
My old high school had one of the most high-priced proxy-filtering systems on the market. I made a list over a hundred sites long of how many porn sites I could get to without even using SOCKS. However, it blocked many useful sites, including Wikipedia. I don't want to live in any country that bans Wikipedia.
You cannot effectively censor the Internet without ruining it.
And that's a good thing.

I think I'm all for schools' rights to monitor their own Internet access. If a school prevents a student from looking at certain websites on the school computers, it's not much different than me blocking content on my own machine and lending it out to others. I do wonder how well those schools expect to fair, though, if their resident autodidacts can't go out and seek knowledge on that Information Super Highway. Methinks if those schools have certain criteria they have to apply for to keep getting public money, they'll need to make sure that whatever actions they take better their students' GPAs--or, better yet, their understand of disciplines.



And, yeah, regulating the Internet is actually pretty easy. One billion people--some 1 in 6 humans--have access to an Internet connection where they can't put "6" and "4" into a search engine (or a text message on a cell phone, for that matter) at the same time, because they just might be trying to learn about the protests at Tiananman Square. Try scheduling anything in the afternoon during the 6th of the month or in July. Heavy forbid you need to talk about the price of tea in China.

[jean-luc]

Pfft.
My old high school had one of the most high-priced proxy-filtering systems on the market. I made a list over a hundred sites long of how many porn sites I could get to without even using SOCKS. However, it blocked many useful sites, including Wikipedia. I don't want to live in any country that bans Wikipedia.
You cannot effectively censor the Internet without ruining it.
And that's a good thing.

The kind of 'most high-priced' high schools implement is no where near on the level of the equipment implemented by state-mandated filtering regimes. Iran, for example, purchases a system from the US-based company Secure Computing. Iran pays millions of dollars each month for this system, and both Secure Computing and Iran have very large staffs of individuals dedicated to identifying content that should be blocked. This is far beyond the resources that a high school would even consider spending on such equipment
It works out as a good deal for the Iranian government, because they don't actually pay for this - they simply require that ISPs implement the filtering system in order to be licensed, which forces ISPs to pay for the system.

Although China is the only country known to have implemented such a system at this time, there are also systems widely available now (Secure Computing, for example, has such a product) that block webpages based on content. This is why in China, websites containing the world "massacre" are generally unavailable, and all web sites including the word "falun gong" (a Chinese religious movement condemned by the government) are inaccessible.

It's really quite terrifying how successfully such systems can be--and are--implemented, most particularly when augmented by a social and legal program. When it comes to censorship, and internet censorship in particular, we must "nip it in the bud" as the saying goes. We cannot permit the government or other groups to establish a precedent that would lead to a feeling that censorship of the internet is in any way acceptable. This is why I so vehemently oppose measures such as FCC docket #07-195 that establish a state-mandated filtering scheme under the guise of protecting children.