Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

In fact, no country allows unrestricted flow on the Internet of pornographic, violent, gambling or superstitious content, or content on government subversion, ethnic separatism, religious extremism, racialism, terrorism and anti-foreign feelings.

The US basically does. The government never censors the Internet; producing child pornography or running an illegal gambling site may be illegal, but there is no filter on Google to prevent you from finding those things. Terrorism, anti-foreign feelings, racism, government subversion, ethnic separatism, etc., are reprehensible, but are protected speech here. The government could find itself in trouble if it prevented someone from publishing something about one of those topics ("prior restraint"), and has lost many cases where it has tried to remove this information after the fact.

Basically, anything goes except libel, obscenity with no cultural value, and speech to incite imminent lawless action.

So basically Xinhua, get a clue. China is the outlier.

Internet censorship: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship

Pervasive: Burma, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, People's Republic of China, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam

Substantial :Australia, Bahrain, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen

Nominal and others: Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Fiji, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Ireland, India, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Malaysia , Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States of America

Specifically the US, although not much:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Unit...

Man that makes sad -- go Australia :S Although, note that at this stage it is still "nominal" in practice while the plans are yet to be implemented.

Well, even countries with very US-like legal heritage, such as Australia and Britain, have tried to impose national-border content-filtering. So sadly, the US is still somewhat of an outlier. Turns out putting an explicit absolutist free-speech right in the written constitution was a good idea!

Yeah, but even in Britain respected publications are free to speak their mind about inappropriate government actions, like cases where freedom of speech is violated, like this one ...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/philipjohnston...

Which is even debatable if it was the right thing to do, and it's not like you can't find that movie (Fitna) on the Internet with a simple Google search.

Sorry, but this article is just setting up a straw man.

And it's the same story all over ... governments try to impose more restrictions to "protect" it's citizens ... people fight back by rioting or voting against the government. That's how democracy works ... you win some, you lose some, but mostly it's a balance (I'm thinking about the state of affairs in the EU here).

What really worries me is the current situations where many people and companies are paying lip service to China's policies, even though it's not in their interest to do so.

Sooner or later other governments will adopt similar policies ... hey, if it works so wonderfully in China, why shouldn't it work for the rest of the world? Australia is apparently doing just that ... although it's not like Australia hasn't been guilty of other crimes against humanity, like genocide, so personally I don't have any expectations from them.

If someone was found showing child porn on the net, arrested, and put in prison -- which does happen, even if those children are anime characters -- is that not censorship? What is the difference between putting someone in jail for producing a particular type of content and censorship? The FCC fines television stations for saying "fuck" on the air or showing female nipples -- is there a difference? I'd rather my fuck be censored out than fined for it. If it is censored, I don't lose anything.

Frankly, if I was producing some kind of illegal content that today would land me in jail, I'd rather the government just censor it and leave me my freedom to walk around and produce other types of content that aren't illegal.

I don't see a lot of difference between censorship and threats from the secret service for putting a picture of gwb on your myspace page with a knife stabbed through his hand. If that poor teen had simply had her photoshopped image censored she'd probably have had a less traumatic experience with the whole thing -- she'd still be livid -- but she wouldn't be afraid.

The point is that censorship does happen in the U.S. Playboys have black plastic covers on them in the convenient stores here, but not in Switzerland. Why is it okay for our government to censor some types of things and not others? Where do we draw the line? Perhaps it is being drawn between what most of us find acceptable and that which we don't.

Perhaps China is drawing the same sort of line in what they require Google to filter? Perhaps the stuff they censor creates a social environment that most people don't appreciate just like fuck and nipples in the U.S.

Yep, that paragraph is crafted for internal consumption.

The average American reads this and thinks "that's not quite right, I don't have most of these restrictions."

The average Chinese reads this and thinks "yeah, every country censors, why is Google singling us out?"

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