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Japan Seeking to Govern Top News Web Sites
RemyBR writes "A Japanese government panel is proposing to govern "influential, widely read news-related sites as newspapers and broadcasting are now regulated."
The panel, set up by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, said Internet service providers (ISPs) should be answerable for breaches of vaguer "minimum regulations" to guard against "illegal and harmful content."
The conservative government, led by the Liberal Democratic Party, or LDP, is seeking to have the new laws passed by Parliament in 2010."
Governments, no matter how benign, really hate unfettered access to information.
The most discouraging part is a majority of people seem to agree ("...well, as long as it's to fight the terrorist...").
The most predictable part is someone will say "...this isn't about free speech".
A truism: "When somebody says 'this isn't about free speech', it almost certainly is".
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
"The conservative government, led by the Liberal Democratic Party"
There's something a little odd about that name, don't you think?
Are you kidding?
So when a news agency reports about irregularities in the next election, and the government forces the story to be clearly marked as speculation and inaccurate, you see no problem with that?
Censorship regimes take many forms. You still have things to learn.
See US Liable Laws for a good, civil way to take care of malicious harm. Barriers are high to prevent abuse, it's done after the fact and has nothing to do with the government except for the government providing a neutral judge and documentation of the case. Free speech is so important that prior restraint is reserved only for extreme danger like nuclear weapon design and even then it's debatable. Other restraints like the DMCA are laughable and will be struck down sooner than later.
Setting up a powerful board with a vague mandate is a very different kettle of fish. Analogies to broadcast don't hold internet water. The public interest in pull media demands freedom and neutrality where the public interest in once scarce spectrum demanded accountability. We have all seen how abused that power over broadcast was ... because we now have free internet news for fact checking. That free media has proved more consistent, informative and reliable than broadcast ever was. "Regulation" of the internet will make it look more like broadcast than reliable or truthful. Without care, it will be pure censorship and can also be used to smear and cause harm without redress.
It is hard to believe that this basic issue has escaped the attention of those planning "accountability".
do you live in the U.S.A? could you imagine the Bush regime making the standards for "verifiable accuracy", look at their distortions to justify war and warmongering, cover-ups for environmental damage and interfering with scientific studies, etc.
If you read the article, you'll see that this problem apparently extends beyond simple fact-checking. For example, categories such as "religion" and "political party" are already being filtered by rules which are ostensibly meant to make mobile content safe for under-18s.
I have no problem with holding the media to account, but the goverment should not be doing so when it has a vested interest in the output it would be monitoring. Further, the legislation wouldn't limit government control to matters of fact or accuracy (difficult categories to establish in the first place.)
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
No its much easier. With the Internet its very very easy to find free press.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
There is an argument that broadcast media must be regulated, seeing as how it takes place over public airwaves. I don't see how that applies to printed media or the Internet, though.
Censorship regimes take many forms. You still have things to learn.
Xenophobia takes many forms too. And you also have things to learn.
Things in Japan work differently than they do here. In some ways, they have more freedoms than we do. In other ways, they may have fewer. On balance, their system works. It is different than ours, but it works. They have a low crime rate, one of the world's largest economies, very low poverty, and nobody who lives there ever complains about government oppression that I've ever seen. There is no "Patriot Act" in Japan, for example - nothing to the same extent, anyway.
One of the reasons their government probably works as well as it does is that election campaigns only last a matter of weeks, by law, and there are restrictions on how the press reports on them. There is not this free-for-all, superficial shrill screaming back and forth for literally years on end where people are forced to choose up sides and fight rather than work together.
I'm not arguing against freedoms of the press. What I'm saying is nothing is completely unregulated (the press here are not allowed to write libelous articles just because they don't like someone, for example), and it's wrong to assume that the restrictions Japan puts on its press or its citizens are somehow worse than the restrictions we put on our press or our citizens. We don't have some magic formula here that every other country has to copy. Other countries can do things their own way and still allow their citizens to live full and free lives.
Japanese do not have more freedom than Americans, and their system works, but only barely. They have a low crime rate because fewer crimes are reported, not because they're not occurring (something that has been changing in recent years). There is no Patriot Act, but I'm now required to have my fingerprints and photo taken every time I come home to Japan, even though I've lived here for six years, work as a teacher, and have a Japanese wife, and despite the fact that the only terrorist acts ever committed in Japan were done by Japanese.
Election campaigns only lasting a few weeks means that the people have less time to hear about what's going on, have less time to discuss, and are usually less informed when they finally vote on somebody. Also, candidates are legally limited by how much of the population they can attempt to reach at any one time outside of certain channels - hand-outs, for example, can only be distributed to 8% of the voting population.
How are restrictions on how the press reports on a candidate beneficial? When they're discouraged from revealing things that might cast a candidate in a negative light, even though everybody might be a lot better off knowing? Also, while the Japanese press never writes negative articles about all things Japanese, they feel no such restriction when it comes to writing libelous articles about foreign governments, companies or individuals.
Japan manages to function pretty much exactly the way it always has for the last couple of centuries despite the imposition of the American-written constitution because just like any country, their politicians know how to interpret the law in ways that benefit their own agendas. Those that are in power tend to stay in power; Diet seats still manage to be passed down through powerful families, regardless of the "democratic" process, and the government is currently trying to instill fear into their citizens to serve their own ends.
I recently had my conversation class at the high school where I teach writing about critical issues, and some of the students chose "internet regulation" as a topic. I let them write about it, even though I wasn't sure just how it counted as a critical issue, but now I see by this article that they were responding to the tripe that the media has been feeding people as the government ramps up to passing these stricter regulations.
Remember, in Japan, "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down." The Japanese don't appreciate dissent, and those that are above you are supposed to be all-knowing and infallible, come hell or high water.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life