Censoring the Internet
It looks like Germany has plans to begin censoring the Internet. With a rallying cry of “child pornography!”, the Federal Office of Criminal Investigation will keep a list of banned sites, and require Internet Providers to disallow access to these.
This follows in the footsteps of Australia, who happily fine citizens $10,000 per day if they dare to link to a banned website. How do they know that a site is banned? They don’t — listing the sites is illegal. I guess that means you find out by receiving notice of a fine.
Perhaps this is not surprising as Germany raided the office of a German website at Australia’s request. Their offence was listing those sites banned in Australia (which is not limited to child pornography, as we shall see below).
Censoring the Internet is a little bit stupid, for several reasons.
The nature of information
First and foremost, information on the Internet is in digital form and the Internet itself is a distributed distribution network. This — as the Recording Industry Association of America can tell you — is a recipe for content that does not get distributed according to any particular rules. Web distribution is quite good at circumventing barriers, whoever might be setting them.
This is due in part because digital information is easy to copy and move. If you want to ban a page on mrtopp.com, I can very easily have it up minutes later on mrtopp.co.uk. If I needed a brand new domain name, or a new web host, it might take a matter of hours. It’s easy.
The structure of the Internet
Second, it’s easy to bounce things around. If this site is banned in Germany, you can simply view it via a UK proxy. Or view the RSS feed through an appropriate reader. Possibly, you could still view the Google cache that’s been stored.
In short, there are plenty of options to bounce off another location on the Internet, or to view the content as part of some other non-banned page. Censoring them all is impossible, and any system designed to account for current measures will be obsolete in a week.
The size of the Internet
Speaking of “censoring them all is impossible”, how many pages are on the internet? Google just gave me 393,000,000 hits for the word “sexy”. Who is going to go through each of these sites, and determine if it’s the right type of sexy?
Or do we get rid of anything that includes the words “child pornography”? In that case, goodbye Big Bad Blog — this article now has those words.
It is neither practical nor realistic to try to block content in this manner.
The problem has not been stopped
Moreover, what does the censoring of these websites actually do or accomplish?
Does it take it offline so that nobody can find it? No.
Does it punish those who create or look at the material? No.
Does it — in the case of child pornography — do anything to help the victims? No.
All it does is make those who would view it work a little bit harder, and reduces the frequency at which it is viewed accidentally. All while endangering the concept of freedom of speech — as can be seen by the fact that Australia’s list expanded to include anti-abortion groups and dentists.
No matter how you feel about anti-abortionists (or dentists), surely their voices should not be silenced.
An intelligent approach to child pornography should involve the actual removal of content, punishment of offenders, and help for victims. Censorship accomplishes none of this — but it may leave those looking for dentists in the dark.
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ARGLE.