Thousands Marched Against Censorship

funfail writes "Thousands of Turkish demonstrators poured into central Istanbul yesterday to protest against the government's Internet censorship. New regulations from Turkey's Internet Technologies and Communications Authority set to come into effect on Aug. 22 will require Internet service providers to offer a choice of four filtering options: family, child, domestic or standard. Many websites are expected to be blocked as a result of the filtering measures."

Comments

At least they're up-front about it

[Tx]

At least the Turkish government is taking responsibility for the censorship. Here in the UK, the Internet Watch Foundation basically has a free hand to censor the internet; the IWF has the blessing of the government, but it's not a government agency, so there's no parliamentary oversight, they're not required to answer to anybody as to what they blacklist, and unless they fuck up spectacularly, nobody actually knows what they're censoring. We just have to hope it's only actually nasty kiddie porn, but as the aforementioned fuck up illustrates, their judgement is open to question. Our government likes it this way because technically the government isn't censoring anything.