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Geography, Laws, and the Internet
Sara Chan writes: "This week's edition of The Economist has the cover story and lead editorial devoted to how geography affects the Internet after all. The whole of China is basically firewalled. In France, Yahoo! is appealing the court ruling that banned its selling Nazi memorabilia. In Iran, ISPs are required to block immoral sites. Each country wants to impose its own laws on others, of course without reciprocation. The editorial concludes thus: "The likely outcome is that, like shipping and aviation, the Internet will be subject to a patchwork of overlapping regulations, with local laws that respect local sensibilities, supplemented by higher-level rules governing cross-border transactions and international standards." Not all new, but worth pondering."
Barbarism seems to doggedly stay with us, regardless of the growth of physical technology.
If you want to offer services worldwide, you should compy with standards worldwide.
That is completely impractical. There are millions of legal entities world wide(countries, states, counties, cities), is it beyond the capability of any business to keep track of them all. If a legal entity doesn't want content, I think it should be up to them to keep it out like China does. Not to require some foregin business to notice that somebody is french.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
What I mean is.. there's no need to panic because some things are not they way they should just now. Criticism on the internet often referes to bad/unsuitable things published to the masses.
As an example, today in a large swedish online newspaper, a reporter found a huge "scoop". He found out that one of the Universities of sweden was providing computer resources to swedish nazists. After a bit of research, it came out that the university was running an Irc-server (dalnet) where the nazis held "online-meetings".
Noone would consider it a scoop that a bunch of criminals phoned each other over the telephone network, or that they sent snailmail.
The Internet will get integrated into our everyday routines, and its use will get balanced to what it's good for.
And where's the problem with china being firewalled, isn't that all up to them ? I bet there are firewalls protecting western world internet resources against china as well...
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
In the US, the corporations are trying to impose regulations to get maximum profit, while the government (for now) has mostly stayed out of it because of respect for free speech. Outside the US, where speech is not so free, governments will try to regulate in accordance with their countries beliefs. I hardly think this can be compared to shipping and aviation.
Regarding the cover story, the hinderences caused by distance will (like everything in the computer field) be overcome by technology. Data traveling from PC to server and back at the speed of light can have very little difference in travel time when the computers are next to each other compared to opposite sides of the planet. Of course we're far from this (optics direct to the computer, instant switching, etc.), but we'll get there, just like everything else. We'll look back and laugh at cover stories like this in the decades to come.
Developers: We can use your help.
http://www.eff.org/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/ barlow_0296.declaration
or click here.
[Connection closed by foreign host]
So long as countries assert sovereignty over frequencies in the EM spectrum, satellite will be subject to all the restrictions of land-based Internet.
Already we have seen how Canadian satellite phone providers have been pressured into compliance with USA tap-and-trace regulations, through the FBI's hook into pending applications for broadcast licenses.
The internet was the first opportunity to really set the whole world free. Its a shame that it had to happen like this. Freedom to think is the only real freedom anybody has, and it sucks to have the best transfer point for that though restricted. IMHO The internet was the most important technological achievement in the history of the world, and now it's being neutered.
We all have our problems. But in this case, its easy - you don't want your citizens to see something? Its up to you to restrict them and deal with teh consequences like being voted out of office (if your citizens have that right.
Yes in an ideal world everything would be free and all would be free to see it - but that just isn't gonna happen. Sure, we can bitch about China firewalling and filtering everything - but that's life in a communist country.
Yes, I'm American so I can take this stance since my net use is pretty much wide open unless the FBI has a bad day, but beyond that, as long as some other country doesn't try to stick their noses into an American companies business (yeah right) I'm happy :)
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I think the biggest thing we're all waiting for is for someone to break a law in another country, and find themselves arrested and extradited.
The Skylarov case comes to mind, obviously, but it's slightly different. Mr. Skylarov was accused of breaking US law, and then when he voluntarily entered the US, he was arrested.
What scares me, and should scare the rest of you, is the possibility of a foreign nation demanding extradition of someone for breaking that nation's laws without ever entering the country physically.
It is a simple matter to break Singaporean or Chinese law - simply denounce the government. Many other countries have similar laws, and if I should put up a website denouncing the Chinese government, that website would be in violation of the law in China. But I'm not in China, I'm not a Chinese citizen, the website wouldn't be in China.
That may not matter. China can demand my extradition to China to stand trial. Certainly, today the US wouldn't comply with that demand. But how long until keeping China happy is more important than a single US citizen? China produces a LOT that's exported to the US, and enjoys most favored nation trade status currently. This gives them a certain amount of clout with the US government (admittedly, not enough to extort $1million for an airplane sitting on a runway for 6 weeks or so).
If you think this can't happen, look to the state of California extending its jurisdiction to anyone in the world (the DeCSS case). I'm afraid this is only the beginning.
Thanks for taking a moment to listen to my ramblings and consider.
We have servers in Beijing that send e-mail to US employees. The user account they send from is <watchdog@DOMAIN> because they're doing system monitoring (they're the WATCHDOGs, get it?)
Anyhow, ANY mail they send to the US bounces. But here's the cool part, it bounces back to the sender (watchdog) but when that (as an alias) gets forwarded to the US again, it goes through, probably because of the null-sender envelope on the bounce.
We know that its some active proxying mechanism that's intercepting the messages because the bounce message is something that the MX's in the US can't possibly generate (e.g., we have the source code for the MTA and the string that the "remote side allegedly sent" to cause the bounce doesn't exist).
So, yes, despite your anecdotal "evidence" of there not being any firewalling mechanism, there most assuredly is one, and it plays havoc with my mail on a daily basis.
What France is trying to do to Yahoo, in contrast, will have a globally chilling effect. France is trying to shut down Yahoo's auctions of Nazi-related collectables not at French borders, but on servers thousands of miles away, intended for non-French audiences. If they succeed, Yahoo will no longer be able to offer these auctions anywhere.
French laws concerning shipping don't affect what goods I can manufacture in the U.S. unless I try to ship those goods into France. By the same token, French censorship of the Internet shouldn't affect what content I can produce in the U.S. Censored content should be stopped at French borders, not at the source.
To be fair: the U.S. is no better. Our DMCA gets Norwegians and Russians arrested. Our Carnivore will intercept e-mails well beyond our borders. Our patent laws affect software authors and distributors world-wide. The U.S. (and California in particular, it seems) has a rather elastic sense of its jurisdiction, too.
A country's right to exert control over the Internet ends at the country's borders.
--Patrick
We (just meeting the USians here) should be setting an example for freedom, not censorship and control.
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
Quote: If they don't want their citizens to see stuff - then its up to them to filter it
I must take an aside here and mention that in the US, if 'they' don't want you to see stuff they just don't report it.
I'm going to give you a couple of links to a web site that has forced me to admit that I knew nothing about the world. The site is the World Socialist Web Site. These people have an agenda, which I find quite refreshing because once you get used to it you can quite easily learn to look past it to read the quality news and analysis beneath. There's nothing worse than the myth of of objectivism, someone who's pretending to be objective is merely hiding their opinions inside the news insidiously. Why are all those WTO protesters violent anarchists? Why can't I find information on CNN that describes why 150,000 people show up in Genoa? Besides one page that after reading other opinions elsewhere is just so much of Huxley's soma. Remember many of these people were foreign nationals who spent a non-trivial amount of money to travel there specifically to protest.
I don't believe myself to be a radical, as some may accuse me. I believe in Democracy, I believe in Capitalism, I don't believe we should all rush out and overthrow our government. The other component of government is values and that is what I read the WSWS for. I'm a Canadian so I readily identify with Socialist values and am naturally open-minded to them.
As a further aside, what about the US' last elections? This article talks about the military role is those elections and is based primarily on an article written by The New York Times. If the conclusions in the article are valid (and only you the reader can decide that) then the US has taken a step off of democracy's road and onto the road of authoritarianism.
I'm afraid of Americans.
>
> This part of the article will be a non issue once satallite internet takes off in a few years.
Owned and operated, pray tell, from citizens of where?
The burden of blocking that which is illegal/objectionable/whatever should be on whatever community the content is illegal in. It shouldnt be up to yahoo to ban the sales of 'objectionable' material. If France doesnt like it, France should figure out a way to block it. If nothing else, they should tell the ISPs operating in France to not allow their customers to access yahoo auctions, if they want to continue to operate legally in France.
That's just one suggestion, I'm sure there are other ways to do it. The point is, no country should have legal jurisdiction over an internet company except where the servers are located.
Other than that, if the government of a country/state/town/whatever want to keep the people from seeing a certain site, they can figure out a way to block it themselves.
-J5K
p.s- I'm not advocating blocking sites or justifying the behavior of governments that censor what its citizens can and cant see. If they're going to censor anyway, they should just do it for their citizens, and leave the rest of the world out of it.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
I live in Texas, and operate a website hosted in Florida. Easy enough, two jurisdictions to worry about, both in the same country. But my cable modem service provider is Time Warner; I have no idea where my insidious signals get bounced on their way to Florida.
And, of course, there's the people who visit the site. I get hits from every continent, and it's been shown that it's not possible to accurately block an entire large geographic block. If some country out there decides to be as arrogant as the US, I'll be obliged to obey the laws of some country I didn't even intend to contact.
The Economist's story is good, but the conclusion should be restated for brevity: we're hosed.
we already do that here... just, on a state level. every state wants to control every other state's emails, phone calls, etc. if you do some crimes across the internet , you're going across state lines, blah blah blah, and you're in federal pound me in the ass prison. what's it matter that if i break a law in china, iraq, or anywhere else? they don't export fugitives to us, we don't to them. bah
Runnin' On Empty
This sort of filtering doesn't merely apply to bidding on nazi stuff or seeing /. from China. One of the ways that oppressive powers retain control is by limiting or distorting the availability of information to those under their influence.
A friend of mine grew up in a communist state, and he told me that as a young man he'd always imagined the beleaguered citizens of the U.S. wandering around under gray skies feeling sad that they lived under capitalism. Capitalist newspapers, books, broadcasts, were all filtered out of his society's media: they had no way of being aware what their lives might have been if things were different. How he's got the internet, and he can can see, if he wants to, all the amazing things that go on in lots of different places. He thinks that if more citizens in his country had been able to see that their expectations and beliefs about what a human life could be were baseless, the revolutions would have happened sooner.
I've never heard of any world political figure starving to death, even ones from countries where famine is rampant. Now in my life, yes, the internet is mostly used for liesure and commerce, but maybe for others it could the the medium for the sorts of social changes that would bring food, shelter, and safe living conditions. But for the internet to facilitate these phenomena, it must not be filtered.