We dreamed the internet would free the world, but it was just a dream.

[Karmadillo]

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=43&ItemID=8717

The Net Censors
by George Monbiot

<edit>

In 2002 Yahoo! signed the Chinese government's pledge of "self-regulation ": it promised not to allow "pernicious information that may jeopardise state security" to be posted(5). Last year Google published a statement admitting that it would not be showing links to material banned by the authorities on computers stationed in China(6). If Chinese users of Microsoft's internet service MSN try to send a message containing the words "democracy", "liberty" or "human rights", they are warned that "This message includes forbidden language. Please delete the prohibited expression."(7)

A study earlier this year by a group of scholars called the OpenNet Initiative revealed what no one had thought possible: that the Chinese government is succeeding in censoring the net(8). Its most powerful tool is its control of the routers — the devices through which data is moved from one place to another. With the right filtering systems, these routers can block messages containing forbidden words. Human-rights groups allege that western corporations — in particular Cisco Systems — have provided the technology and the expertise(9). Cisco is repeatedly cited by Thomas Friedman as one of the facilitators of his global revolution.

"We had the dream that the internet would free the world, that all the dictatorships would collapse," says Julien Pain of Reporters Without Borders. "We see it was just a dream."

<edit>

I think, if they were as honest as Mr Wang, everyone who works for Rupert Murdoch, or for the corporate media anywhere in the world, would recognise these restraints. To own a national newspaper or a television or radio station, you need to be a multi-millionaire. What multi-millionaires want is what everybody wants: a better world for people like themselves. The job of their journalists is to make it happen. As Piers Morgan, former editor of the Mirror, confessed, "I’ve made it a strict rule in life to ingratiate myself with billionaires."(15) They will stay in their jobs for as long as they continue to interpret the interests of the proprietorial class correctly.

What the owners don't enforce, the advertisers do. Over the past few months, AdAge.com reveals, both Morgan Stanley and BP have instructed newspapers and magazines that they must remove their adverts from any edition containing "objectionable editorial coverage"(16). Car, airline and tobacco companies have been doing the same thing(17). Most publications can't afford to lose these accounts: they lose the offending articles instead. Why are the papers full of glowing profiles of the advertising boss Martin Sorrell? Because they're terrified of him.

more...

Edited to include a more representative excerpt.

[Amonester]

1. "Please delete the prohibited expression" (!) I wonder what

happens if the user refuses to please the censor... In case the user is surfing the Internet in some kind of an "Anonymous" state, that is. Is such a "state" possible? (Mobile access?)

[MrBenchley]

2. "We had the dream that the internet would free the world"

Wow...and they thought the dotcom bubble would last forever too....

Has there EVER been a subject about which more horseshit was written than the internet? Barnum had nothing on internet boosters...

Who, who, who could have possibly foreseen that a single "net" under which all people would live might get regulated somehow (snicker)...

One is reminded of Thoreau in Walden: "Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end. . . . We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."