Japan Seeking to Govern Top News Web Sites 146
RemyBR writes "A Japanese government panel is proposing to govern "influential, widely read news-related sites as newspapers and broadcasting are now regulated."
The panel, set up by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, said Internet service providers (ISPs) should be answerable for breaches of vaguer "minimum regulations" to guard against "illegal and harmful content."
The conservative government, led by the Liberal Democratic Party, or LDP, is seeking to have the new laws passed by Parliament in 2010."
Can't resist... (Score:1)
Re:Can't resist... (Score:5, Informative)
The LDP have had a total monopoly on Japanese politics since WWII. It would be most amusing for this to pass, the to-be-regulated web sites "move" out of Japanese jurisdiction and life goes on as before. Japanese always ignore warning signs[2] when noone is looking, so I wouldn't expect this to amount to much no matter what.
[1] Soka Gakkai and IKEDA Daisuke are to Japan what the Church of Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard are to the US. My source? I was unhappily married to one.
[2] I have a really cool digital photo of the highway bus terminal in Tsukuba. There
s a sea of bicycles completely burying a sign in back which reads "no bicycle parking here".
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Re:Can't resist... (Score:5, Funny)
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That is strange as hell. Well, I can understand why you didn't like the chanting - that freaks me out as well but it's hardly just Soka Gakkai, they all do that, and Christians freak me out too. But *dragged*?
That's a figure of speech. The marriage went downhill very fast the Saturday morning she expected me to go to Shinanomachi and I was hung over from a sanjikai with my company the evening before (and she punched me).
Never mind Christians. That is not part of the discussion. I tolerate all religions, I do not tolerate in the *slightest* proselytism. Period. Maybe you can grok from that where I stand on Christianity.
Was this a long time ago, btw?
Around 2000. Her family was from Ishioka, Ibaraki-ken and I visited there once (after w
Re:Can't resist... (Score:5, Insightful)
So when a news agency reports about irregularities in the next election, and the government forces the story to be clearly marked as speculation and inaccurate, you see no problem with that?
Censorship regimes take many forms. You still have things to learn.
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Xenophobia takes many forms too. And you also have things to learn.
Things in Japan work differently than they do here. In some ways, they have more freedoms than we do. In other ways, they may have fewer. On balance, their system works. It is different than ours, but it works. They have a low crime rate, one of the world's largest economies, very low poverty, and nobody who lives there ever complains about government oppression that I'
Re:Can't resist... (Score:5, Informative)
People in Japan are very much self-censored through societal pressure. It's really a totally different working environment from what I've seen and rather freedom-reducing since people are strongly encouraged to not stand out but to fit in with the rest as best as you can. This is true at least in Tokyo, but from what a friend of mine who lived for two years in the countryside tells me it's the same there. Youths can stand out but once you reach adulthood it's a totally different story.
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Your second paragraph is "Dear God, they have a different culture!"
Youths can stand out but once you reach adulthood it's a totally different story.
You may have lived in Japan, but I don't think you spoke to many Japanese people. When I first got here, I had the same impressions, but after spending most of my time with Japanese people and not with foreigners I came to realize that's totally not the case. People here are really no different than anywhere else in the world except they're nicer to
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I live here, for more than five years, and Japan is in basic like any other country. Yeah things work different, but thats like every country. In basic, one big difference is, that japanese are way more friendly and way more helpful.
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It's also wrong that foreigners can't start a business. Some do, some don't. It's probably not as easy as in America, but thats country laws and you can't expect the same everywhere
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This does remind me that I should go to Japan again sometime.
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So... Japan has less crime and higher standards of living... And they don't let people participate as much as we do?
They may be on to something here...
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The big advantage, is if a lying, deceitful, blatantly corrupt and falsely religious scum bag get's to be prime mini
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Re:Can't resist... (Score:4, Insightful)
Election campaigns only lasting a few weeks means that the people have less time to hear about what's going on, have less time to discuss, and are usually less informed when they finally vote on somebody. Also, candidates are legally limited by how much of the population they can attempt to reach at any one time outside of certain channels - hand-outs, for example, can only be distributed to 8% of the voting population.
How are restrictions on how the press reports on a candidate beneficial? When they're discouraged from revealing things that might cast a candidate in a negative light, even though everybody might be a lot better off knowing? Also, while the Japanese press never writes negative articles about all things Japanese, they feel no such restriction when it comes to writing libelous articles about foreign governments, companies or individuals.
Japan manages to function pretty much exactly the way it always has for the last couple of centuries despite the imposition of the American-written constitution because just like any country, their politicians know how to interpret the law in ways that benefit their own agendas. Those that are in power tend to stay in power; Diet seats still manage to be passed down through powerful families, regardless of the "democratic" process, and the government is currently trying to instill fear into their citizens to serve their own ends.
I recently had my conversation class at the high school where I teach writing about critical issues, and some of the students chose "internet regulation" as a topic. I let them write about it, even though I wasn't sure just how it counted as a critical issue, but now I see by this article that they were responding to the tripe that the media has been feeding people as the government ramps up to passing these stricter regulations.
Remember, in Japan, "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down." The Japanese don't appreciate dissent, and those that are above you are supposed to be all-knowing and infallible, come hell or high water.
There are better ways to stop libel. (Score:5, Insightful)
See US Liable Laws [wikipedia.org] for a good, civil way to take care of malicious harm. Barriers are high to prevent abuse, it's done after the fact and has nothing to do with the government except for the government providing a neutral judge and documentation of the case. Free speech is so important that prior restraint is reserved only for extreme danger like nuclear weapon design [wikipedia.org] and even then it's debatable. Other restraints like the DMCA are laughable and will be struck down sooner than later.
Setting up a powerful board with a vague mandate is a very different kettle of fish. Analogies to broadcast don't hold internet water. The public interest in pull media demands freedom and neutrality where the public interest in once scarce spectrum demanded accountability. We have all seen how abused that power over broadcast was ... because we now have free internet news for fact checking. That free media has proved more consistent, informative and reliable than broadcast ever was. "Regulation" of the internet will make it look more like broadcast than reliable or truthful. Without care, it will be pure censorship and can also be used to smear and cause harm without redress.
It is hard to believe that this basic issue has escaped the attention of those planning "accountability".
No, the US is not avoiding censorship. (Score:2, Informative)
The US has a legal and philosophical framework that expressly forbids censorship but has ignored it in crucial ways. Broadcast monopolies have been a universal dissaster for free press and democracy but were technically required until about twenty years ago. The unanimous clamoring for "traffic shaping" by ISPs and telcos, if granted will propagate broadcast monopolies onto the internet. It's hard to tell if that or a government panel would be worse but both are unacceptable. Our high minded constitutio
Re:Can't resist... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Can't resist... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes...because all the other administrations have been so much better. Please.
I'll be glad when Bush is out of office. Because then you'll have to blame the lies, cover-ups, and simple fuckups of the government on someone else.
Hell no, I wouldn't want the Bush admin having control over these 'standards'. I wouldn't want any other administration having that power either.
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I have no problem with holding the media to account, but the goverment should not be doing so when it has a vested interest in the output it would be monitoring. Further, the legislation wouldn't limit government control to matters of fa
might actually work... (Score:1)
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Never fails (Score:5, Insightful)
The most discouraging part is a majority of people seem to agree ("...well, as long as it's to fight the terrorist...").
The most predictable part is someone will say "...this isn't about free speech".
A truism: "When somebody says 'this isn't about free speech', it almost certainly is".
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Yes, usually what they really mean is "don't let those pesky human rights concerns get in the way of what I want to accomplish." For some reason, we put up with people like that. It's rather pathetic really.
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Knee-jerk didn't read article, dismiss Japan (Score:3, Interesting)
The article doesn't mention anything resembling terrorism as the reason. What the article discusses in some detail is that the Japanese ruling political party, the LDP, has ruled the country virtually unchallenged for decades. The slightest bit of thought shows that the LDP has achieved almost every single goal of what the most progressive Democrats are advocating in the United States:
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The LDP has ended up creating a "capitalist development state" that thrives on neo-fascistic cooperation between government and corporate entities, dominate the government largely through
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It's somewhat of a truism that most people who succeed in a system wish to maintain it; what the grandparent seems to be suggesting is that the majority of Japanese 'succeed' in the system and therefore would not object, or in fact, would support, t
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"Well, what sort of chance does that give me??? Alright then! It IS about free speech."
"!!!SEE!!! It *IS* about free spech!!!"
(with apologies to Monty Python)
Putin-like (Score:3, Interesting)
It sounds like a Putin-style media. Free-press is getting harder to find in the world.
Re:Putin-like (Score:5, Insightful)
No its much easier. With the Internet its very very easy to find free press.
strange... (Score:5, Insightful)
There's something a little odd about that name, don't you think?
Re:strange... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like the USA to me. "Liberal" and "Conservative", yet no matter which is elected the government expands in size and power. Clever, isn't it? That there might be no real difference between them is a fact about which we are more honest when it comes to other countries, apparently.
Re:strange... (Score:5, Funny)
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!
Salt and pepper (Score:1)
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Generally, it most screwed up when both the Executive Branch (President), and the Legislative Branch (Congress) are controlled by the same party. If Bush had had a Democrat controlled Congress, things might not be so screwed up. Now that we have a Democratic controlled Congress...a Democrat president will screw things up just as bad, but maybe in a different direction.
There is
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"The conservative government, led by the Liberal Democratic Party"
There's something a little odd about that name, don't you think?
Not really.
American conventions of liberal Democrats vs. conservative Republicans is simply an *American* labeling of political affiliations. And even then it's just a function of our current time period
To give you a domestic example of this being switched, remember those crazy "Radical Republicans" of the late 1850's, early 1860's that has the "Radical" notion that blacks were human beings too?
Or to show you how foreign countries don't use the same nomenclature, there's the National Democratic P [wikipedia.org]
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> National Democratic Party of Germany which is "viewed by its opponents and the
> mainstream media as a de facto neo-Nazi organization".
Then there was the National Socialist German Workers Party. No xenophobes, they even accepted a former Austrian corporal as their leader. And the rest was history.
Re:strange... (Score:4, Interesting)
Suffice it to say that the word 'liberal' is not a clearly defined word. John Locke, for example, did not support democracy. Liberalism in its most original form was essentially a philosophy supporting freedom and equality for the people in all forms. Eventually this morphed into liberal socialism; which supported the state providing for individuals so that they had equality of opportunity as well as freedom of opportunity. Modern liberalism, as a rule, continues along this trend, integrating more elements of socialism into it.
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Eventually this morphed into liberal socialism; which supported the state providing for individuals so that they had equality of opportunity as well as freedom of opportunity.
Only in the US. In Europe (e.g. UK), liberal means more what libertarian does in the US: social and economic freedoms are both important. There is more discussion of this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Liberalism [wikipedia.org] and on the accompanying discussion page.
The Liberal Party of Australia [wikipedia.org] is actually economically laissez-faire and socially conservative--the exact opposite of the US.
Btw, I would argue that liberal socialism involves a trade off between equality of opportunity and freedom of opportun
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Re:strange... (Score:5, Informative)
Only if you assume that American political terminology is standard for the rest of the world.
In most places "liberal" is equivalent to what Americans call "libertarian," and the parties Americans call "liberal' are known as "labor" or "left".
Re:strange... (Score:4, Insightful)
Just want to second that. Here in the U.S., conservatives have labored since the 60's at least to redefine the term "liberal" for their own benefit. They achieved success in late 70's/early 80's. At this point, few people know any meaning for the term other than what the political class uses. Still, everyone is pretty far away from Latin liberalis at this point. I wonder whether the concept behind that term will ever be strong enough again to merit a word that unambiguously denotes it.
"Liberal" in U.S. political discourse is the result of an extremely successful and masterful propaganda/marketing campaign. I despise the result, but damn, you have to admire such conceptual and linguistic control of the masses.
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Re:strange... (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, what Americans call 'liberal' we call 'moderate Conservative'. What we call left-wing, Americans call pinko Commie traitors.
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To make things worse the current Labor PM calls himself a fiscal conservative, the greens call themselves conservationists, and the conservatives claim to support liberal democracy.
Reconciling this confusing terminology is simple. They ALL claim to support UHC, therefore they must ALL be commies.
Re:strange... (Score:5, Informative)
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Makes you wonder: A.if Japan has the equivalent of a Libertarian party.
B. why we haven
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In Minitrue we trust (Score:2, Informative)
What this means (Score:3, Interesting)
it will only force the free press underground (Score:2)
I know they want to be like us... (Score:1)
Precedent already set: Japan powerless to rule web (Score:5, Informative)
In January 2007, a small court in Japan, making a judgement on yet another slander case, announced that 2channel's holding company was bankrupt and it would be repossessed. This claim was openly mocked by Hiroyuki on 2channel's splash page, and nothing of the sort happened, although 2channel's Japanese ISP ended its operations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2ch#Free_speech [wikipedia.org]
Re:Precedent already set: Japan powerless to rule (Score:5, Funny)
Sure, just post it to wikileaks.
Re:Precedent already set: Japan powerless to rule (Score:2, Troll)
If I were worried about my site being shut down due to offending people with money/power, I sure wouldn't host it in the U.S. Find a country without DMCA takedowns, secret courts, and "terror" lawsuits that come with automatic gag orders, in other words, some place with more freedom than the U.S.
Holding to account (Score:1)
Yes, we need to maintain the fictions and story (Score:1)
The last thing we need is a open source subscriber based intelligence service where importance is determined collectively, and the discourse and content results from collaboration of minds not behold to any special interests but in the interests of our coll
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Having said that, I don't really believe in a "collective" in the political sense (although I am without doubt that there is such a thing in the natural and spiritual sense). You can speak of it as though it were a real thing, but it's not. It's more of a construct, an illusion; it's something that politicians find v
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What I was saying is that a group (be it a nation, etc) of free, empowered individuals who are subjects of no one, with the right to do an
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This is why individual freedom of expression is never suppressed it would be detrimental to the collective.
A good example is China it has created an environment that blocks innovation conditioning everyone to be the same and forcing types of behavior. It has failed to fully implement collectivism by giving every individual a vote.
As such it needs to copy t
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Anyone who wonders this is ignorant of history; the world has been in such "turmoil" since the beginning of recorded history. There have been small pockets of relative peace and prosperity in one place or another over time, but the general history of the world is one of war, oppression, and chaos.
That's not to say we couldn't construct a society that is generally peaceful -- the fact that there hasn't been military action in as populated an area as the
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This is where a single word becomes a stumbling block and you get caught up on that one word and so miss the entire meaning of what I was saying. Just be
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...implying that the world is in more turmoil now than in the past. Which is not true, which is what I pointed out. I was saying nothing about the rest of your post. It looks like you fell over the same "stumbling block" you seem to enjoy ranting about everyone else making. As if you're the only person here who has the ability to think critically? Do you really think ad hominem attacks make you more righ
No kidding (Score:1)
great here come the nipzis! (Score:2, Troll)
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Japanese culture has always been wildly different from that of 'the west'.
It's just odd that you'd call them nazis for censoring, but not for fining & caning citizens and foreigners alike into compliance with some very strict laws.
How ironic (Score:1)
"Censorship" again (Score:2)
Now, if some website is circulating news with similar audience, would not it be fair to traditional media to apply the same rules to non-traditional competitors of the traditional media? Internet has matured, dudes and dudettes, and became a
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I've never bought the argument that broadcast media must be regulated because it uses public airwaves. If I take a soapbox to the local public park, stand on it, and talk in a loud voice about how I don't like the mayor's policies, and think the city council should do a better job of overseeing the city's Public Works depart
Oh Liberal Democratic Party... (Score:5, Interesting)
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One article you link to is by Debito, the other being a 404 link to Debito's website. Just so you know, Debito is a bit of an extremist, so you might want to take some salt with what he says. Also, usually there's heavy filtering done by the author for subjects the author is not very familiar with.
A 403 isn't a 404. The picture was still in my cache so I didn't realize direct linking was blocked. Simply refresh and you'll be okay. It doesn't matter which way Debito leans, I was presenting both links to provide references for what I was saying. () The first was an accurate translation of a right-wing book against the Human Rights Protection Bill, citing that the current Prime Minister (a member of the LDP) is against it too, since it would "suppress freedom of expression." The second was the firs
Hey Japan: (Score:2)
What I'd wonder is ... (Score:2)
For example, if I have a personal site on my home machine, and I put up pictures and a few stories from our recent vacation, does that make my site a news site?
Will I be regulated as a news organization if I let the world know what members of my family (including the cockatiels and the conure) have been doing recently?
There are good historic reasons to worry about such things
Sorry to interrupt your Japan-bashing but... (Score:2, Informative)
I concur (Score:1)
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agreed (Score:2)