THE INTERNET WAR HAS BEGUN

It was only a matter of time before legislators’ oppressive tendencies finally caught up with the freedom-enhancing technology of the web.
Perhaps we should be grateful to have had over a decade of truly free internet access- warts and all (alas, such IS the price of true freedom!). Unfortunately, it is only now that this medium is coming into its own, becoming the powerful tool it was always intuited to be, capable of forming the basis of a genuinely participatory decentralized global democratic movement, empowering individuals the globe over to take back their lives and their world from the dominion of corrupt social systems and political regimes.
But now all of that is under threat. The news stroies are showing up more and more frequently. Supposedly ‘democratic’ nations such as germany, australia, canada, and britain, all are in the process of trying to pass (or already have passed) legislation that blocks certain undesirable websites, censors access, restricts what users can or cannot do online, criminalizes the open sharing of information, or makes it legal for the government to monitor your private email or other communications, all in the name of security.
Those on the side of these measures typically trot out the same tired arguments that have been heard and disproven countless times before. Usually they posture with one or all of the Big Four internet boogeymen: Terrorism, Piracy, Child Porn, and Hate Speech (throw Hackers in there for good measure too).
The problem is that methods used to block these vile threats are indiscriminate, easily capable of dampening ANY views or websites the censoring body deems innapropriate.
It’s just another layer of control, an attempt by the government to insert itself into the only genuinely free medium the world has ever known.
Freedom is not a halfway thing, a partial accomodation with repression and tyranny. Freedom is free- unrestrained, but bearing a greater share of responsibility in order to balance that openess. Ultimately, the governments of the world want to act as our parents, making decisions on our behalf as to what we are entitled to see and do with our lives. And for the most part we are more than willing to go along with this, playing the role of children, desperate to be led and told what to do- for our own good, of course.
But this dispicable manoeuvre is bound to fail. It’s simply too late to put the geenie back in the bottle. We have gotten a taste of the possibilities, and are loathe to let them go without a fight. It won’t be long before this technology becomes fully democratized and uncontrollable. ISPs, subject to rules and regulations, threats and intimidation, will be things of the past, vanished in the face of direct user to user networking. Like a chain reaction in a nuclear explosion, the internet will become uncontainable, spreading without limit.