But just because President Obama is leaving the Internet more-or-less alone doesn’t mean that he’s a friend of freedom. Under his watch the government has taken financial control of the banks and the automakers, nd nxt h’s gng fr Mdcn*. Gvrnmnt cntrl f prvt prprty s th vry dfntn f fscsm.

Just because he isn’t specifically an enemy of our narrow interest group doesn’t mean he isn’t an enemy of freedom in general.

* knw sclzd mdcn s pplr cncpt rnd hr, s n brf: )why nt ls sclz fd – r clthng – r trnsprt? W ll nd ths thngs t srvv, s wll; nd B) d y rlly thnk th bg mny mkrs wth th lbbysts, th ns wh’v crrptd nd brkn th crrnt systm n mrc, wll b hrmd by ths lgsltn? r wll thy b n n ll th scrt ngttns?

I for one would love to see the link you refer to.

I do hope Italians will rise up and stop these people. I have plans to live in Italy some day but if this continues it will never happen.

Bad enough Jimmie Proof digressed into Cheney and Palin. But this thread is not going to digress into a flamewar about the health care bill. Back on topic, people.

For instance, anybody who would consider requiring authorization for video uploads wouldn’t flinch at requiring authorization for the use of encryption(authorization would, of course, be available for connecting to recognized financial institutions and commerce outfits, so that good honest upstanding consumers would not be inconvenienced, not to mention the advantage of having a new carrot/stick mechanism to hold over institutions whose business would require an encryption authorization). With the advances in deep packet inspection and related tech, your ISP would be technically capable of ratting you out easily enough.

Anonymization? Your ISP knows what traffic is going to and from your machine, they are carrying it there after all, even if they can’t see inside encrypted packets. Tor has its uses; but the fact that you are using it is blatantly obvious to a competent adversary, and you can’t reasonably expect an entity evil enough to be worth evading to tolerate the means of evasion for very long.

The internet isn’t magic, it runs over wires which somebody owns, wires which are buried in some country’s dirt. No amount of cleverness can get you past the implications of this fact.

His only real obstacle is Murdoch’s Sky, which is able to move some real muscle in Europe. The Italian intertubes will die a slow “death by a thousand cuts”. In the country, Silvio has very few enemies at his level, and none of them is very interested in defending the ‘net (if anything, they would benefit from its death). Even the FIAT group is basically leaving the country.

Make no mistake, he will probably win. He controls the agenda and the media, he’s the only real personality around, so he wins even when he loses. If you didn’t like his Italy, you’ve probably left the country already. I have.

(Regardless, expect his son to enter politics in the next 10 years; he’s smart enough and quite good-looking, will win easy and will probably keep enacting the same policies.)

This happens everywhere every year: a government wants to raise some tax by 10% so they tell people they must raise that tax by 20%; the opposition will fake a protest lasting from days to months until they settle to the 10% goal. At that point the govt obtains what it wanted from the beginning and the opposition fools its voters into believing they really can control the government. This is how fake democracies work, it’s always the case in Italy and I’m totally sure it will apply to that law as well.

It isn’t that hard!!

Some example of tax rates in euros:

Pack of 20 CD 80 ’5.87
Pack of 20 DVD 4.7 GB 8.2
A Memory Card 8 GB 0.24
An 8 GB USB stick 0.72
iPod Classic 160 GB 16.10
16 MB Mp3 Player 9.66
Video recorder with integrated hard disk from 250 GB 22.54
Console games with 120 GB memory 6.44
TV decoder with integrated hard disk from 160 GB 16.10
Multimedia External Hard Drive 640 GB 12.88

Note: we already had a tax on some recordable media but this time every digital memory.

The next step would so be to block videos websites, but the European Union won’t allow that. And considering Berlusconi’s Italy credibility (corruption, deficit, so on…), he is not in good position. He would certainly bolster and go on, and provoke Italy implosion or something like that.

Berlusconi is a clown, but of the evil kind.

Berlusconi owns 3 private TV stations and his gov’t indirectly controls the other 3 public ones. He also owns dozens of newspapers and magazines. As many have said, written and warned him, he doesn’t believe in governing a democratic country…he wants to own it like a dictator.

Even with his billions he perfectly realizes he can’t influence all the negative publicity the Net is bringing him.

I’m sure the entire world has noticed that Italy is not the “La Dolce Vita” country it once was. The Mafia is completely out of control, we have Russian-like corruption running rampant, a practically non existent opposition, a prime minister throwing whore and escort parties without end, and restaurants in Rome charging tourists 900 USD for lunch for two. The Net naturally picked all this up…and it’s getting on the government’s nerve!

Correction: It’s getting on a 73-year-old billionaire’s nerves.

What to do? Time for some “legalized” censorship. Yes, an Italian can pick up a dot com address and get foreign web hosting but the landlines and frequencies are owned by Telecom Italia whose owners go to bed with Berlusconi’s gov’t.

Pay close attention, folks. The situation in Italy is finally starting to get out of hand. Unfortunately, last week there was a “hint” of ethnic cleansing in the southern Italian region of Calabria. Yes, there was! Yours truly lives in Southern Italy.

Now, we’ll need special gov’t permission to upload a video to YouTube.

Have a great Sunday everyone!

Pasquale
http://www.OnlyInItaly.com
http://www.Twitter.com/onlyinitaly

More to the point: although policy debates can be interesting (in the correct context), the underlying problem is that the specific policy is largely irrelevant when discussing party politics. Vote Republican, they’ll nationalize X. Vote Democrat, they’ll nationalize Y. Either way is just as bad, even though the X – in this case the Internet – is one of our priorities.

It’s too easy to be blind to the mistakes made by one’s own ‘side’ in the argument.

Can someone throw something better than a statue of a church at Berlusconi already? He deserves far worse.

The craziest thing? His popularity in Italy increased after this attack because people felt sorry for him! There is also speculation that the attack was staged for that very purpose, which would lend a lot of support to the theory that Berlusconi wants to control the web as it is what is currently making his spin & lies come undone.

“He’s corrupt, connected to the underworld, handled the 2009 eathquake aftermath terribly and is a womaniser who spends public $$$ to satify his needs…. but he was BLEEDING! omg! poor guy! Let’s just forget that he’s been ass-raping Italians for the last decade”.
How fickle has politics become (or more accurately, when did people become such suckers)??

This guy is scum. Italian politics are an international laughing stock. Do you think the two might be connected?

That would be from a famous movie about the lesser-known historical figure of the so-called Marquis Le Cricket (rough translation), a character from the nobility who used this simple phrase to end all discussions with common people. Just like our Beloved Leader.

Who, by the way, DIDN’T have an affair with a 19-years old, as told in one comment. She was 16-17 at the time, and 18 being legal age in Italy this makes the PM a bona fide pedophile – but of course this little aspect of the scandal was hushed up by his own media…