The future of the Internet is very much up in the air

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in internet on (#SN5K)
story imageThere are a growing number of toll roads on the information superhighway. There are now more countries with a heavily censored Internet than there are ones with a completely free Internet.

Worst among the 65 countries assessed is China, which also happens to be the country with the largest number of internet users (641 million). Thanks to a new law passed last month, Chinese internet users are now even more vulnerable to criminal charges if they are found to be spreading "rumors" or politically delicate information online.

In the United States, President Barack Obama advocated for an open internet earlier this year. But the US takes the fifth spot after Iceland, Estonia, Canada, and Germany.

As more and more countries follow China's example and clamp down online, a great ideal of the Internet seems to be on the decline, if not already lost. "The future contours of the Internet are definitely up for grabs," says Crawford.

"Very interesting countries hang in the balance, like India, where 1.2 billion people could be online - only about a quarter of them are right now," she says. "Cuba is just coming online, and so is much of Africa. Who are they going to follow? My hope is that they look to the United States, Australia, Canada, and the EUas a model of openness. Not just for economic purposes, but for the thriving of human beings."

http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-11-03/future-internet-place-open-exchange-ideas-very-much-air
Reply 3 comments

Australia (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2015-11-05 20:23 (#SQ0V)

A lot of us use a VPN now. We still do not know what our ISPs are logging or how much it will cost. The NBN is a joke - a new fibre network now being deployed in places with copper. Freedom? While being watched 24/7. No. Do not use us as a reference.

Re: Australia (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2015-11-05 20:33 (#SQ1R)

At least you have some idea of what's going on. In New Zealand, John Key announced that he would resign if it was discovered that we were under mass surveillance.
Well, it was discovered, but he redefined it as "mass data collection," which isn't the same thing in his mind, so he didn't have to resign.

The freedom of the internet is under attack (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2015-11-06 18:07 (#ST3J)

"UN plot to make the Internet a safe space" does a horrible job of covering the story but it's real and these people are VERY well connected politically to names like Ban Ki-Moon, Hillary Clinton, George Soros, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt. They want to make it illegal to disagree with a feminist online by calling it violent harassment and pressing charges under laws meant for death threats. Someone in Canada has already gone to court over this.

Or the powers that be can buy off the people running the centralized services like Twitter or take over democratic institutions like Wikipedia to remove people and information they want to suppress from the most popular venues. The less popular venues can be smeared in the press to discourage people from going there, filtered from mainstream sites, forced offline, etc.