International Law

Slippery slope of censorship

Given the proposal for Australia to introduce ISP level content filtering, this post from Techdirt's Mike Masnick is worth remembering:

The Slippery Slope Of Censorship In ISP Filtering

We've talked about how government attempts to censor certain types of internet content tend to be a slippery slope towards more and more censorship. They usually start out with "child pornography" and then move onto other areas as the line concerning what's acceptable is blurred. It gets even worse when the government doesn't reveal what sites are censored, as it gives them pretty much free reign to block whatever they don't like -- whether or not it's actually problematic. You can watch the walk down the slippery slope over in the UK where some folks in the government are saying that, if they already filter out child porn, why not filter "radical Islamic" websites as well. Does anyone actually believe that it's websites that are turning folks into radical Islamic fundamentalists? Either way, it's not hard to go from there towards censoring other types of content that people in the government don't like, no matter how harmless it might be.

Read more here.

Full post as published by Freedom to Differ on January 18, 2008 (boomark / email).