my take on internet censorship

barring physical distance and network infrastructure that gives rise to poor connection, the internet has no definite boundaries.

yes, there are administrative boundaries, that can control how and to whom information can go out from private servers, but controlling what your users can access, on a nation-wide level, is quite a different matter.

on private networks, it is feasible, common and fair to implement proxies through which all traffic must be filtered, since such networks are relatively small (usually only up to a few thousand machines) and usually all the servers and often most of the clients as well, are completely owned by an organisation.

on a nation-wide network, however, users are connected through backbone lines to the internet. information is not just freely accessible, but overflowing. The practicals:

1. for gateways that filter on domains, a trivial workaround would be accessing content via public gateways. gone to china, done that.

2. for gateways that filter on content, encrypted traffice via a know foreign server would do the trick.

3. if you're looking for pure content, you could always try another language.

4. you could always get your friend overseas to keep you updated. if you don't have one, you could always find one on some chat server, forum, community, IM or dating site.

5. enforcing policies on local content providers does not mean that similar content is not available. uses will find it on foreign servers. unless you can shut the whole america down...

6. some countries have export laws surrounding software. but always, someone out there writes something similar and gives it away for free, from a server sitting in a country that doesn't have such laws. i still think it stupid to have a law that dictates whether you can send software out of a country purely based on the fact that the software was written while in a certain country. anyway, the link is usually there and you just have to click "OK"...

the principles:

1. the whole concept of the internet sits on the abstraction of physical connections. this is philosophically in disagreement with trying to enforce physically-based policies.

2. the internet is full of redundant links. meaning that if you close down one link (ie, filter at a gateway), chances are there are other links to the content.

3. search engines cache content. even if a content has been taken down, it is possible that a cache of it is available.

4. because we do commercial transactions on the net, we need encryption to work. the same encryption can let us tunnel through forign proxies and get to the content we want without the scrutinity of censoring proxies.

5. the internet is a world totally different from the physical world. the whole (yes, 100% of it) internet is made by hackers, not by policy makers. hackers made it work beyond physical and political boundaries and policy makers cannot change that. if there were any rules or laws in this world, their enforcement and implementation would have to be as profoundly different as the internet is different from freight routes.

6. people who grew up with the internet create a different social atmosphere. we need to remember how piracy actually drives sales through free marketing and customer education, and work from there. in the real world, theft leads to loss of profit. but when you step into the software world, everything is about knowledge. and it is knowledge that drives the hunger for greater knowledge. the only real reason people want to protect their trade in knowledge, i believe, is because they are not confident of growing faster than their customers to continuously attain a greater capacitiy to provide even more knowledge. ridiculous sales margins claiming to retrieve previous investments in research, at the end of the day, i believe, contributes to social stress. and i think the stress is building up - no longer between the workers and the beauracrary, but between knowledege workers who are scattered all over, including within the beauracrary, and the managers, sales people and politicians, whose sole purpose in this all is to reap as much unbelievable profit as they can. the difference is this - the beauracry used to own all the facilities in which workers can create something of value that can be sold by the beauracracy for money or power, but now, the worker owns all of this. in fact, the worker himself, is the facility from which all value flows. admitedly, the greed and selfishness of people will never change. but a new social order where the knowledge workers hold not just knowledge but also the ability to implement policies and managers have the authority but not the means to put their policies across, it would be interesting to see how they would evolve. as knowledge economies become more specialised and workers become more highly skilled and self-sufficient while markets becoming more discerning, the power game i think, would take on a new dimension. in such a world, the top-down approach to internet censorship is simply strange.

7. the reason we are starting to have social problems arising from the use of the internet, i believe, is not because we are not controlling the medium strictly enough, but because the policy makers have not come to terms with its nature. social response all these problems are signs that the old order is losing ground and a new balance has not been achived. i think policy makers need to change their approach to the internet and cosider it part of the social fabric in order to make policies that will work. but this might take a generation, when those who grew up with the internet become policy makers.

well, give and take, that's my take. might not be yours, for now, but let's just wait and see.