Tuesday, November 22, 2005

"Governing the internet ... might be indistinguishable from destroying it."

The moment the free flow of packets over the Internet is no longer substantially guaranteed, it will cease to be trusted. Companies which are building businesses worth billions over the Internet protocols would stop if they knew a relative of the Tunisian President had to be placated for commerce to continue. Applications such email, instant messaging, searches, e-commerce, online banking, virtual medicine -- to name a few -- would be at the mercy of bureaucratic caprice, not just in the United States, but in every swamp and backwater imaginable. In the end, governing the Internet, especially in the United Nations sense, might be indistinguishable from destroying it. But one can see how that would appeal to those who yearn for bad, bad old days.
—(Wretchard)

2 comments:

ambisinistral said...

No Pasaran has a post about the possibility that certain internet sites in France were blocked during the rioting.


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Late on the afternoon of November 9th, within the measures taken by de Villepin (but obviously not made public), the Emeraude plan was deployed: it makes it possible to divert the whole of French internet traffic through military servers equipped with filters which block certain sites. Several methods were used: blocking IP addresses at the point of the routers. At Wanadoo, only domain name servers (DNS numbers) were filtered. At Cegetel, HTTP addresses HTTP were blocked, and so forth.

The majority of blocked sites and blogs weren’t the great many Muslim attack sites or the Islamists sites that were quite active (such as Oumma, Majlis, and the like) but the most active nationalist sites like Occidentalis, SOSfrance, Coranix and France-Echos.


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Seems rather paranoid to me, but who knows?

Charlie Martin said...

Uh, Peter, that would be a quotation from and a link to that very posting on Belmost Club.