Internet Censorship is becoming a big topic on the web over the last few years. More and more, governments are trying to gain control of the internet, and monitor or censor what their citizens can view, and do on the web.
The Turkish government has blocked quite a few websites and blogs as of late, and a filtering system is in the making, that may possibly go live on the 22nd of August. This filtering system will make it possible for the government to keep logs of every individual user's activity. As to why or how the system is being put into place, no one really knows. This filter however is an invasion of privacy, as noted by a group of hackers known as "Anonymous". In protest to this recent announcement, they took down Turkey’s Telecommunications Communication Presidency (TIB) which [at the time of this article having been written] is still down.
"Anonymous" and many other hackers have taken to attacking government websites, and other acts of the sort to protest the censorship that is constantly rising in many countries, and they are gaining notice.
Recently, the Protect IP Act has been under the spotlight in the United States, as it passed the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously. If passed, this bill would give authorities the right to legitimately seize any domain name they deem to be facilitating copyright infringement. The bill, also however, states that if a domain is not registered or controlled by a U.S. company, the authorities can also order search engines to take it completely out of their search results, have ISPs block it, and order the ad-networks (that fund the sites operations in most cases) along with the payment processors for said sites to stop providing their services to the site being blocked.
This new bill is targeting mostly "pirates", and those who distribute copyrighted goods over torrent trackers. While this is all fine and dandy, there are more circumstances to be noted with this idea.
One of the more important notable problems that will arise is the fact that not all torrent trackers are used for illegal sharing. In fact, there are many torrents out on the web right now that are perfectly legal. Many webmasters, individuals, and even companies have taken to using the peer to peer technology that took off in the early 2000's to share their freeware programs, and many other free creations of their own, along with other non-copyrighted materials.
Another important consideration to be made is, if this bill does pass, and the government gets the right to being censoring these domains, that might make way for them to grow with their censorship. This bill is already walking a fine line on infringing rights in The First Amendment [despite it's main alleged intent being to combat piracy].
What is your opinion?
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