you torture me, you torture me not...,
2005-10-10 22:38:48
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"A clanking, thudding mass of valves and wires and metal boxes painted grey, nursed through the night in the basement of the physics building by an attentive graduate student"...,
2005-10-18 13:30:56
ICANT, ICANN, ICANT:
we really can without cant. The EU, Russia, Brazil, China, Iran and Cuba want more say in the "governance of the internet", a fiendish enterprise manipulated and controlled by the US Government. By "governance" we mean:
The US Commerce Department effectively supervises Internet traffic because it approves changes to the Internet's "root zone files" or master directories. In other words, the US government has veto power and can theoretically deny access.
Could. China "has", and major US corporations have assisted them in doing so. I vaguely remember something back when I read slashdot regularly about Australia setting up porn filters around their major net lines, but in any case most major powers have denied or attempted to deny access to things they don't like. Many have, legally, succeeded.
But for Americans this one is really easy: we one-up these sad miscreants by proposing an international body based upon an indisolvable bill of internet rights forbidding the "theoretical" denial of access to anything on the internet.
As a demonstration of our seriousness and our principles we might force our own corporations to cease and desist their denial of access to major, underserved populations.
The EU and Oceana would have to accept pr0n. France and Germany would have to cope with the existence of neo-nazi websites. China and Iran and Cuba would have to accept miscreant blogs, the Washington Post, and the BBC.
The US would have to do nothing because - and last time I checked the supreme court ban on the enforcement of COPA was still in effect - it hasn't denied access in this manner to anything. Our adherence to the principles of freedom of speech is matched only by our sophistication in undermining it.
Wouldn't it be nice if we had a government serious about expanding freedom democracy that would say, "Bring it on." Let's see who falls apart first.