Thursday, February 21, 2008

Control and the Internet

I found Professor Chun's opening of this week's lecture intriguing, about privacy and control on the internet with the article about Yahoo helping to “jail” a Chinese writer. Because the internet is a global entity basically, how can one country decide what should and should not be available through it? How do laws transfer over from one country to the next? The internet seems so free: information is perpetually being received and disbursed, lies perpetually told, truths found out, facades created. It's hard to imagine any group actually being able to confine and control the internet unless they have control over every server in the world. In a way, the internet is like the media. It can be squashed down and censored but there will always be small subsets that will rebel, that will go underground, defying the rules. Information, if important enough, will always eventually leak out.

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