A Horrifying Interactive Map of Global Internet Censorship 158
An anonymous reader writes "Imagine a world where the book burners had won. A world where information is filtered and must be approved by governments before it can be accessed by their citizens. A world where people are held down and kept in line by oppressive regimes that restrict the free flow of information and bombard citizens with government-approved messages. Now stop imagining, because this horrifying world already exists..."
Re:Stop being such a drama queen. (Score:5, Insightful)
a) the ubiquitous availability of information is a relatively new thing. Public libraries didn't even really exist until the latter 19th/E20th centuries. The internet is less than a generation old.
b) governments and power structures have controlled such information throughout the span of human history.
I'm not even 100% convinced that the ideal of universal access to information is an unalloyed good.
Nothing is pure good. Fortunately that's not the standard for good. Unfettered access to the Internet merely has to be better than government censorship of the internet. That's the real choice, not internet vs no internet. Unfettered access to information is one the founding principles of Democracy. Western nations have embraced this idea for around 200 years. Developing nations that aren't particularly democratic or are newly democratic are having to come to grips with this fact.
A country where the Government gets to censor what we see and hear can't function as a democracy. Democracy relies on the citizens being able to freely communicate. That can't happen under censorship. In the US the founding fathers reconized this because they were subject to a government that tried to control them. That's why the created the first amendment, and why other countries equally recongized this basic fact of a functioning democracy.