Friday, June 19, 2009

Friday liberty blogging - Assaults on the neutrality of the network

The Internet as we know it: a place almost free of control, with sites rewarded by audience proportional to their qualities, with a good anonymity protecting political dissidents, this place is under high fire from governments and ISPs.
While we might have thought this kind of attacks would come from very liberty killing countries such as China or Iran, they are now in the headlines even in most liberal countries such as France or Germany. To give just a few examples:
  • In France, giving as a pretext the fight against illegal downloaders of music and movies, the government is trying to install spywares on all citizens' computers.
  • In Germany, giving as a pretext the fight against child pornography, the government gets a law voted for a censorship policy, and stars building an architecture able to filtrate the web's content.
  • In England, judges rule that there should be no anonymity for authors of texts made public on the Internet.
  • In England, an ISP starts using bandwidth modulation to discriminate against sites helping its competitors' businesses.
As far as I know, most of my readers are probably aware of some of these problems. So, instead of commenting on each of these assaults separately, I decided that from now on I would keep a list up-to-date gathering all articles that I would read about this matter. Most should be in English, yet there could be articles in any of the languages I can speak (French, German, Romanian and variants).
The web page of the list is at this address.
You can also find an RSS feed at that address.
I support individual rights

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I can read French, English, German and Romanian, please feel free to write in whichever language you prefer.