mendax.org

In a beautiful fit of nationalistic pride for local laws, it looks like the cyber-police are getting a bit too arrogant for their own good. If it’s not the Frenchies complaining about legitimate historical pieces from being sold on Yahoo’s auction sites, it’s the local authorities arresting folks for housing material on a site located in another country, where housing that type of material is, in fact, legal.

Following up on my earlier post on the State of the Internet, this issue is just as pertinent as the last, IMO. In fact, it’s just as important, since the United States is going about trying to enforce its local laws on foreigners just as other countries are trying to enforce their laws on the U.S.

How can a foreign country expect a U.S. company to comply to laws pertaining to every country in the world that has access to the Internet? What’s worse, how can a foreign company feel okay about replacing files on a server that reside in a country not their own, a server that they’re not even paying for? Should they have the right to break a U.S. TOS agreement because a citizen of their country is going about posting “blasphemous material”? Are we to let foreigners determine for us what content our servers host are religiously benign? What are we, English colonies?

This whole nationalistic nonsense on the Internet has to stop. The Internet isn’t supposed to be about countries, it’s supposed to be about information. The second censorship comes in (especially censorship on behalf of the The Man, be he French, Afghan, Australian, or what-have-you), I say we lay down the damned smack and delete their .nation descriptors from our registered domain indices. That’ll show them.

Of course, this does us no good when the United States does the same shit and arrests people for having done things perfectly legal in wherever-the-hell they did them.

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