I don’t really think this is about the Internet.<p>There’s a battle being fought all over the world right now over what people can and can’t freely say. European and Middle Easter companies are on the censorship side of things. In France you can get prison time for telling a friend you don’t like Muslims.<p>Now I don’t agree with such prejudice but should we turn the unenlightened into criminals?<p>That’s the issue and it goes beyond criminalization. Recently we’ve heard a lot about the blogosphere trying to force Facebook to take down holocaust denial sites. But that opens the door because the principle is "we don’t like these people so we have the right to stop them from speaking here"<p>But if we in the blogosphere can censor what we don’t like why can’t the Government censor what it doesn’t like?<p>Yes, Facebook is a private company. But it’s a private company that has chosen not to censor these groups. When the public tries to force it to do so you’re setting a precedent that those with power (in this case the public) have the right to force those under their power to censor free speech. Which again begs the question why can’t the ultimate form of power in our modern world (the Government) use that same precedent to censor those under their power (the Citizens)?<p>So this isn’t about the Internet as much as it’s about a decision that affects the very fabric of society itself. The internet is just part of that society.
Censorship is rarely about a specific message. It's about people becoming accustomed to the alien idea that a third party MUST be present to intermediate communication between you and anyone else on the grounds of some nebulous externality (think of the children). I felt this was the most important bit of 1984, often glossed over for the more shocking bits. Doublespeak was a way to censor even face to face communication without any enforcement mechanism needing to be in place besides social pressure.
<i>the censorship in Great Britain of the Wikipedia page for Virgin Killer, an album by the German hard rock group, Scorpions.</i><p>Some of you might be too young to remember Scorpion. They had a worldwide hit in the late '80s, with a song that went, "I strolled along the Thames, passing by Big Ben, listening to the winds of change." Or something like that.