Michael Geist’s weekly technology law column focuses on the growth of Internet censorship and the accompanying pressure on the business community to do something about it. He begins by noting that as the Internet moved into the mainstream in the mid-1990s, John Gilmore, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, coined the phrase “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. “Gilmore’s comments were a reference to the architecture of the Internet, which was designed to ensure that information was delivered by the most efficient means possible and render attempts to block content nearly impossible. Yet years later, a growing number of countries seem determined to challenge Gilmore’s maxim. China is the best known (as evidenced by recent events in Tibet), having implemented both a massive content filtering system that exerts control over external content and demanded that foreign Internet firms establish Chinese-versions of their services that abide by the government’s requirements.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2761/159/
http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/346695
http://www.circleid.com/posts/832072_business_internet_censorship/
Business in the Hotseat over Net Censorship by Michael Geist
Michael Geist’s weekly technology law column focuses on the growth of Internet censorship and the accompanying pressure on the business community to do something about it. He begins by noting that as the Internet moved into the mainstream in the mid-1990s, John Gilmore, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, coined the phrase “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. “Gilmore’s comments were a reference to the architecture of the Internet, which was designed to ensure that information was delivered by the most efficient means possible and render attempts to block content nearly impossible. Yet years later, a growing number of countries seem determined to challenge Gilmore’s maxim. China is the best known (as evidenced by recent events in Tibet), having implemented both a massive content filtering system that exerts control over external content and demanded that foreign Internet firms establish Chinese-versions of their services that abide by the government’s requirements.