The next stage of Governmental policing of the Internet

Here's a scary article from Ars Technica about American and European politicians that want to speed up the "standarization" and "policing" of the internet:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/06/western-governments-mount-major-push-for-internet-rules-of-the-road.ars

Here are some gems from the article's list of goals that the European politician at the center of the article has set for the near future:

"The need for users of cyberspace to show tolerance and respect for diversity of language, culture and ideas"

"The promotion of a competitive environment which ensures a fair return on investment in network, services, and content"

"The need for everyone to have the ability—in terms of skills, technology, confidence and opportunity—to access cyberspace"

"The need for users of cyberspace to show tolerance and respect for diversity of language, culture and ideas"

"The promotion of a competitive environment which ensures a fair return on investment in network, services, and content"

"The need for everyone to have the ability—in terms of skills, technology, confidence and opportunity—to access cyberspace"

Subjective, subjective, subjective, subjective, subjective...

Anyway, the Internet (indirectly) already has government rules. You should have lready been scared.

"The need for users of cyberspace to show tolerance and respect for diversity of language, culture and ideas"

The Internet is the most tolerant place in the world... everybody is welcome from every country to participate on virtually every forum, paid or free. Opinions - however ignorant, odious or off-topic - are permitted from virtually anyone. In fact, the very standards adopted by Western corporations (which, I believe, act as proxies for Western governments) are what has held up greater and more rapid integration of foreigners into the digital age. UTF-8 hardly works on the most dominant operating system (Windows) yet it is clearly the way of the future. Unicode itself is ill-conceived. The XML-pushers are trying to cram every data object known to man into a byzantine dataformat that is backwards and manages to be sub-par for both machine and human use.

 

"The promotion of a competitive environment which ensures a fair return on investment in network, services, and content"

 "The need for everyone to have the ability—in terms of skills, technology, confidence and opportunity—to access cyberspace"

Translation: "We are trying to figure out how to turn the Internet into a glorified telephone network." The fact is that computers are programmable and this changes everything. The networking component of the Internet is not the miraculous part... everbody gets so fixated on TCP/IP and packet-routing, etc. It is the computing machines connected onto the Internet that are the miracle! Computers are the game changer because computers can be programmed to do repetitive, menial tasks at lightning speed (including packet-routing... so even the unique features of the Internet vis-a-vis telephones or radios are down to the computer). For example, a computer can be programmed to perform complex encryption that would be infeasible to perform by hand and which is powerful enough to frustrate the determined efforts of even military intelligence to penetrate. And any old Joe off the street has access to this! Sure, once he's encrypted something, he can transmit it over the very impressive network-of-networks called "the Internet". But what's important is that, after it's encrypted, even the government cannot read it and it's not the Internet we have to thank for this but computers.

So, these legislators are wasting their time. Download PGP 2.6.2. Download Pidgin. Download Tor. To hell with the would-be Internet-tyrants!

Clayton -