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Thread: Are we headed towards Orwell's 1984?

  1. #1
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    Default Are we headed towards Orwell's 1984?

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...859210296.html

    It's easy to understand why countries like Russia, China and Iran would want to rewire the Internet, cutting off access to their citizens and undermining the idea of a World Wide Web. What's more surprising is that U.S. diplomats are letting authoritarian regimes hijack an obscure U.N. agency to undermine how the Internet works, including for Americans.
    Pretty scary, honestly.

  2. #2
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    That is pretty scary. The internet (I always type "interwebs") is, in all seriousness, kind of like its own country. For better or for worse, its users make it operate the way it does. In a way, it is the purest (or not quite as filthy) form of democracy. Other governments should get away from it. You'd think things like SOPA would have proven that is Interwebians don't want their interference. I don't care if there are bad things going on on the Web; there's all sorts of bad things going on in real life.
    The internet is FREE. Shouldn't we be promoting the freedom instead of trying to oppress it?

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    I guess the internet messes up a lot of antiquated business practices. A lot of people/businesses like business as usual and don't want to change, so the internet's connectedness and openness brings a threat to that.

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    the Dragon Master
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    maybe it does bring the threat in but the thing is the United States is a capitalist and free nation: this means that we have the option to become competitive and improve our products as we see fit, or we can leave it alone if we feel that it's at the best it can get.
    another thing is that without the web, the world's tech level wouldn't be as high as it is today, and without the web we'd probably becoming closer to a second (more or less) dark age (technologically speaking)--we would stall out after a while and if the nations want to oppress the freedoms of competing businesses then may i bring up what happened to Russia when they thought they could make a better nuke?
    USA and USSR got into an arms race to see who could build the biggest and most destructive nukes: USA won because the USSR was communist which oppresses the competition that the USA and USSR were in, thus in the end USSR fell.

    forgive me for the rambling there but just pointing out what's going to happen if they try to control the net---btw the 1984 thingy can only really be complete when tehy start spying on us in our own homes, at which point when any government does that they've declared war with the people
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    The article seems to support the US protecting the ideal of universal access, not because of any harm that will befall Americans. But China has a right to regulate it's own people, as does Iran, Russia and whomever else desires to. Censorship is a part of every country's history, even Western ones. This is not an old story in China at the very least, nor Russia, really. As with anything, there is little that the US can do in all of this (I actually laughed when I read "the only way to stop U.N. meddling is to wield a big stick") because they don't have jurisdiction and only pretend to have that kind of authority.

    Also, Virus, there was a lot more to the fall of the USSR than any arms race with the US.
    And it's not like the US hasn't had censorship, and there is certainly been "spying on [Americans in their] own homes."


  6. #6
    the Dragon Master
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    True there has been censorship, but then agian everyone's history is filled with it. It goes back several thousands of years, but now a lot more people are trying to remove it where it needs to be removed and keep it where it needs to be kept. I understand that the net is free for anyone to get on and use but the thing is in order for one individual country to censor it and either protect the people or prevent them from doing anything constructive on it it requires blocking the entire thing for everyone, and that's not a good balance, esp if say about 150 countries want their freedom online while only 1 wants it censored.

    Though there is a way around it: isolate the net for each country. If each country has control over and direct access to there own internet or portion of the internet they can censor it all they want without infringing on the rights of everyone else. After that all anyone has to do is keep track of what's put up on their servers and supercomputers instead of what's being put up on all of them. And yes I understand it'd take a lot of people to keep track of all of this and it would be expensive but it would be better than constantly screwing over the countries that want their freedoms for the ones who want better control over their people.
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  7. #7
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    China already blocks websites for its own people, what you're talking about is the case. From what I understand, the censorship being discussed here is no different than what can already occur, but power is just shifting to the states themselves to control content. China blocking certain things will not infringe on our access of material. If you are sending messages with someone in Russia, you would have to be prepared to have your emails read. Unless the country that you live in puts in laws stating so, your use of the internet will not change.

    (This is based on my understanding of the article. Please correct me if I've missed something.)


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