The Fragmented Net
I used to think that the Internet was steadily and rapidly advancing towards one free global net, with the attempts of governments to control it being only very short lived and futile. These days I'm becoming more and more skeptical about this idea, take a look at these links:
- A while ago Iran banned fast Internet Links to cut west's influence.
- A German court has ordered an ISP to ban a large porn site, because it violates strict German laws on youth protection (the decision is being appealed).
- Tunisia is giving you fake 404 error screens when you try to access the wrong political pages.
- In America, Comcast will secretly sabotage your peer2peer traffic while AT&T will serve you only as long as you don't criticize them publicly (they have since revoked this clause and apologized).
- All in all the last five years have seen a rapid rise both in the number of countries employing filtering techniques as well as the scope of these measures.
- And only 6 percent of Chinese links go out of the country (although the implications of this number is unclear, missing a lot of context - e.g. what percentage of German links go out of the country? But even if this number is unrelated to the great firewall of china, it still gives an idea how much locality continues to matters).
(In the end I still think that the emergence of one truly global net is very likely, but the way to get there is longer than I thought and will include a number of detours)
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