Desicritics Comments on Blogspot Censored in Pakistan

Comment by Anil

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 18:52:14 EST

May be it is just me but if I have to choose between the US govt and a UN body which could be chaired by China or Iran I would go with Dubya.

Comment by Richard Marcus

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 16:07:16 EST

I agree with gazelle. I fail to see how letting the internet, which is used by the whole world, be in the hands of any soverign nation as a good thing. First of all it makes it too much of a target for terrorists who would want to strike at a specific nation. The only people who seem to universally oppose the U.N. controlling the internet are those in the United States where the root is currently held hostage. I don't think it's a good idea that countries are starting to form their own root systems, that will allow them far too much control over usage of the internet in their countries. At least now the people in Pakistan are able to use proxies etc, but what would happen if their government had their own root-people would only be able to access what the government allowed them to access. Whose to say that any soverign nation won't do the same thing. China already takes steps to control it's people's usage, and uses the net to track down and arrest dissidents. What will they be able to do once they have total control. I still remember last fall after I published an interview with Ashok Banker, at B.C.( since reprinted here) that mysteriously the day after he ran it on his bogspot site he was denied access for almost five days. He had been highly critical of the Bush administration and our first reaction was that ther was some sort of cencorship going on. It wasn't until I wrote about it, and it got picked up and run with by a few sites, that Google got back to his repeated requests for assistance and "discovered" that he had gone over the amount allowed for one page(he was just continually adding posts to one page.) All i know is it would take a lot of words to add up to a gigabite which is the number they said he had exceeded. I'm still not convinced of anything either way in those circumstances, it just made me a lot more leary of trusting the internet in the hands of one anybody, whether it's a government or a corporation. There are still too many parts of Africa where they don't even have servers, and have to rely on satallite for internet service. The digital divide is an obsenity that shouldn't be allowed to exist. I don't see how letting the U.N. govern the internet would increas cencorship, if no one government had control how could they block their people from seeing what they wanted. Richard Marcus p.s. I'll post the code at my blog good luck

Comment by gazelle

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 14:36:58 EST

RJ, what good is icann in the hands of the US dept of commerce here? Infact I make the opposite argument from the same premises. The international postal system is also 'International law' Berne Treaty - IPU and part of the UN system. the UN - ITU is a good idea, and favors developing countries. china is already starting to go its own way, anyway.

Comment by DrPolitics

Sat, 4 Mar 2006 12:04:02 EST

Don't Block the Blog! Banner is displayed on my blog and Pakistan Bloggers, we are with you all the way!

Comment by temporal

Fri, 3 Mar 2006 21:28:19 EST

doesn't work:) ptc will realise the folly they tried to block sehbai's US based SAT (south asian times)a year or two back and failed miserably (sehbai folded the SAT recently for personal reasons)

Comment by RJ Elliott

Fri, 3 Mar 2006 20:53:05 EST

This is a good example of why control of the Internet should not be handed over to the UN or any other international body. If they were to assume control, it is possible that sites on certain topics would be banned everywhere, and not just in those countries where censorship of news/information is the norm...

Comment by Aaman

Fri, 3 Mar 2006 20:09:35 EST

Very important and sad news, TeethMaestro, I'm sure most of the usual proxies and anonymizers work, although, what a grief!