The Great Firewall of Europe 191
Glyn Moody writes "The Presidency of the EU's Law Enforcement Working Party wants to create [PDF] 'a single secure European cyberspace with a certain "virtual Schengen border" and "virtual access points" whereby the Internet Service Providers (ISP) would block illicit contents on the basis of the EU "black-list."' Leaving aside the fact that this won't work for lots of reasons, how seriously can you take anyone talking about 'cyberspace' in 2011?"
Re:Not nearly as bad... (Score:4, Interesting)
"Information superhighway" was something coined by Bill Gates in one of his books. The ideas in that book were pretty advanced for the time. He also spoke about the "electronic wallet" (illustrated with Gates' own cheesy drawings), something that took form for us today in the shape of cell phones instead of wallets. He also made clear that the information superhighway was not the internet, but a faster network, that ALSO included internet services. And the ability of interactive "product placement" a la Augmented Reality: watch a movie, see the character's clock... nice, give me more info, computer! And it showed you what it was and how much it costed. The ideas in that book were good, but also scary in the sense that everything was about selling stuff.
You know what's worse than cyberspace and superhighway? "Internet Portal". Something that journalists in my country love to talk about. Any website is a "Portal".
Background (Score:5, Interesting)
This idea is floating around for some time now. Various reasons have been given for such internet blocks: child porn, illegal gambling, drugs, .... Interestingly, the real reason has rarely been named. If you look where the money for the campaigns come from, at the end you always find the content industry.
I had a talk with some upper echelons of the biggest European Telcos a few months ago. They were complaining about the content industry spending money like water to get somehow internet blocks turned into law. Most Telcos didn't like the idea....
The idea of the content industry is, that once internet blocks are legal, they can be used to shoot down sites like PirateBay.
CU, Martin
Single Secure European What? (Score:2, Interesting)