Right now companies on the internet can lose their customers overnight and some of the big ones would be more than happy to get in bed with politicians and create a more regulated controlled operating environment with more hurdles for upstarts.

Lets not give our own rulers the opportunity of introducing coercion, regulations, corporate welfare etc. to exert more political control over the internet even if they claim noble intent.

“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.”

~H. L. Mencken

JG

However if you make the network open, then society has to take responsibility for who uses it and how. Freedom comes at a price. One that many parents for instance, aren’t willing to pay (i.e. supervising children’s Internet usage and teaching them how to stay safe).

This is nothing new of course. Pick almost any area of life and you will find society favouring legislation to “solve” problems, rather than just stepping up to their responsibilities, so the issue of Internet filtering is hardly unique.

http://www.polycipher.com/about.html

Their research appears to be exclusively tasked to tracking BitTorrent users, and they can do it very effectively. PDF link-

http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~dlmccoy/papers/bauer-wifs09.pdf

Sadly, there’s still no really fast proxy to get rid of such restrictions.

Their track record (and methods) for bringing their ‘freedom’ to the rest of the world suck. Invasions, destruction of local culture (people and infrastructures included), they appoint themselves as the Only Holders of Truth and never leave… unless they have installed their own puppet government in place. If that’s their way of bringing freedom, I fear the moment they decide to do the same with the Internet.

I rather have a less US-centric body take charge. Nothing against Americans – just their Foreign Policy.

Educate and create legislation to deal with abuse or misuse of freedom as an exception – not as a rule. And hold individuals accountable, rather than take away choice.

Barry is working on a blacklist to protect us from terrorists and child predators and boogeymen and space aliens and the tooth fairy. Some of these fears are less valid than others (I for one believe in the boogey man!).

“We’re the beacon of freedom and free speech” my ass.

We’re going to make a great firewall of america but say it’s there to combat the War on Terra.

America has no credibility and never negotiates in good faith, don’t believe a damned thing any party in power in america says.

I’m being quite serious.