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Geography, Laws, and the Internet

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the making-up-rules-as-we-go-along dept.

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."

3 of 217 comments (clear)

  1. Re:All of China is not firewalled. by Tackhead · · Score: 5, Interesting
    > It is erroneous to say that the whole of China is firewalled. Only Red China (Mainland China) is firewalled. The democratic Republic of China (Taiwan) is not firewalled.

    Doesn't seem to stop .cn domains from spamming the fuck out of me, though.

    (Paranoid thought: Red China takes a permissive stance towards their open relays and clueless admins because they want the rest of the world's to firewall them too. If they can't completely stop their people from talking to our people, they'll make us do it for them...)

    (Evil countermeasure: When you block mail from a .cn host, make sure the bounce message contains randomly-generated text blocks. The string "I think it's so cool you left the relay open for us to use to send messages through" wouldn't hurt either. If enough admins did this, China's open relay policy might be, uh, reconsidered... ;-)

  2. Re:What did youi expect? by seizer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    That's a bit harsh - the ostensible aims of DMCA and Carnivore are far from nefarious.

    DMCA "aims" (completely unsuccessfully) to ensure copyright can still function profitably (a noble aim, not everybody is motivated to create without an incentive), and Carnivore aims (with more success, but with many more undesirable side effects) to negate the effects of terrorism, the activities of child pornographers, etc etc. There are valid motives behind these things, but somewhere along the line, they got hijacked by combinations of big bizness(TM), stupid senators, and fascistic neo-mccarthyists.

    And as for the US setting an example for freedom, well. I don't think we (non-USians) need to be taught, actually. Freedom is one of those rather instinctive things, and I'm not going to enhance my knowledge of it by reading USA Today (yes, slightly trollish, but I'm pissy about that comment).

  3. We need to respect local customs by alen · · Score: 4, Interesting
    In 8 years in the Army I've been from Korea, to Saudi Arabia, Africa and Europe. Everywhere we went we were told by our chain of command to respect local laws and customs. I think we need to do that with the Interenet too.

    Americans think porn is OK, in the Middle East you can get hanged for it.