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Old 05-24-2001, 09:32 AM   #3
Dagnabit
High Propagandist
 
Join Date: Jan 2001
Posts: 115
I agree, in fact an internet guru once said "the internet treats censorship as a network failure... and routes around it."

I recently had to analyze proposed legislation for libraries to see whether it had any impact on a site that I manage for the elderly. (It barely missed.)

The legislation was (supposedly) aimed at preventing kids from being emailed anonymously from libraries. In fact all this crap does is make the libraries that less likely to offer net access. It increases their costs.

This also has the unwanted secondary effect of increasing and changing the "digital divide" as the poor, netting at libraries, get radically filtered - while the rich live on with cable access and such.

If you've never seen the poor on the net at libraries, it is amazing. As part of this setup for the elderly I went to a library in Germantown (poor neighborhood in Philly). At 2 in the afternoon, every single one of their 20 systems was taken. And everybody there was using the net for something useful (job hunting, online study and such).


The only way to truly control the net will be to radically change its nature, which will also have the effect of making it massively less useful.
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