Senate Bill to Subsidize Anti-Censorware Research

Senators Wyden (D-Ore.) and Kyl (R-Ariz.) introduced the Global Internet Freedom Act earlier this month, setting aside $60 million over two years "to develop and deploy technologies to defeat Internet jamming and censorship." Of course they don't mean libraries and schools in this country -- they're talking about countries like China, as Kyl et al. explain in a National Review article a few days ago. I guess it wasn't confusing enough to (1) subsidize censorware and (2) criminalize researching it -- we also need to (3) subsidize researching it. How about forbidding American corporations from trading censorware goods or services to these "repressive governments," wouldn't that be a good start? Update: 10/30 03:37 GMT by J : Here's the Wired story from early this month on the version that was introduced in the House.

(Sen. Wyden also teamed up last month with Sen. Cox (R-Calif.) on a little bitty resolution standing up for your fair use rights before the tank parade of the DMCA.)

Comments

finally

[tps12]

It's about time that the government steps in to protect us from the corporations and right-wing Christians who'd like to own our souls and shield us from all the "evil" pornography (fourth ring of hell reserved for Slashdotters?). I am a hard-core capitalist, but even I can recognize a market failure when I see one. Just as overfishing once lead to mass unemployment and starvation in the Northeast US, the greed of a few supercorporations (the likes of which were never conceived of by the founders of our nation) and the fiery rhetoric of a few rabid Christians have turned us into slaves of exploitative technology. And people are too stupid to provide a good market for anti-censorware products, so we're screwed. This research should set things right again.