Italy's First Steps in Censoring the Internet

mijio writes "It's not the first time that Italy discusses Internet censorship. The last year, after some guys appeared in a video punching and blaming a kid with Down syndrome, Minister of Education Fioroni brought in to trial two of Google Italy's managers and then proposed and strongly sustained his idea of censoring the Internet to protect the young. Now Ricardo Levi, the prime minister's right hand, is finally successful in promulgating his law on internet censorship. With the goal of "promoting and enriching the pluralism of information," the law rules that everyone involved in "editorial activity" must be subscribed to the "Registry of Operators of Communication" to be prosecutable in case of defamation, where "editorial product" is defined as "any product with purpose of information, education, divulgation, entertainment, aimed at publication, no matter the form it is realized in and the mean it is distributed with." When inquired about the effects of this rule for bloggers, Levi responded, "We have no interest in touching amatorial or personal sites, it would be not feasible". The Times speaks about this paradox as well."

Comments

step back

[l3mure]

Riccardo Levi already stepped back: There was a misunderstanding, he said, we don't want to censor anything and actions will be taken to clarify the law on this point.

This is happening in Germany as well

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

A German court recently forced one of the larger ISPs to block access to the Youporn site. Originally they (the ISP) tried it by blocking access to the IP-Address but since Youporn is hosted by GoDaddy, that blocked their customers' access to thousands of other sites as well. Now they have tried it at the DNS level.

The background to this is that a German porn site had to implement stringent controls to make sure the underage did not manage to sample their wares. Youporn did not bother with this and so had an unfair advantage. I read that Youporn is something like the 14th most popular site in Germany.

Several other organisations apparently have similar plans to shut down access to some site or other.