From Ars Technica:
"The virus of Internet repression is spreading," said Tim Hancock, Amnesty UK's campaigns director. "The 'Chinese model'—of an Internet that allows economic growth but not free speech or privacy—is growing in popularity, from a handful of countries five years ago to dozens of governments today who block sites and arrest bloggers."
Amnesty reserves particular criticism for the firms—often American—that go along with censorship or actively contribute to it. The group has attacked Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google especially for their dealings in China, where all three countries have been involved in censorship or turned over pro-democracy e-mails to the Chinese government.
I remember when I first found out that Google was censoring itself in China my heart broke a little. If anybody could have stood up for what was right... if anybody should have stood up for what was right, it was Google. I guess it's just another reminder that we can't count on the world's giants. The power that will change things is in the little guy, the one man, the individual - it's in you.
Countries don't tend to be terribly consistent on all of this, either. The US, for instance, allows fascist organizations to set up web sites, use the swastika, and incite all the hate they want so long as they don't do anything violent, but it bans online gambling and has arrested several UK executives who run gambling web sites.
Lesson here being: governments don't care about you. They care about your money. Well no, I don't honestly believe that even though it feels that way sometimes.
This is more of a Kafka effect. Government and law are like one gigantic machine, and machines don't think. Things happen or don't, and it's never based on thought - it's just things happening to fall together that way. In a system complex enough that no one person can even hope to understand the whole thing, what's legal and what isn't becomes arbitrary.
Imagine a clock where a thousand people individually contribute parts but none of them ever see the whole machine. You can't really expect that thing to tell proper time... or even be safe.
So it's not that "some guy", or even "some people" are responsible for giving the thumbs-up to hate propaganda and thumbs-down to online gambling. It's just the way this machine happened to operate. At best, it can only ever hope to have an insect's intelligence - and even that is for survival only.
Should multinational corporations be forced to make moral decisions about censorship every time they enter a new market? The companies tend to say no and argue that even the limited services they are able to provide are more helpful than no services at all. Their accusers argue that the "we're just following local laws" defense is becoming the equivalent of the "just following orders" defense that has been used to justify some of the most heinous crimes on the planet.
This sums up Linden Lab's current predicament nicely, doesn't it? I feel for them, I really do... now they have trouble. If they do right by the community, other "RL" governments will protest. If they do right by the governments, the citizens will protest.
They're between a rock and a hard place, really. Meanwhile, fear thuds through the populace that one day they may be punished for expressing what lies within. I feel for them, too.
This idea of Linden Lab's to open-source the server is probably their only way out. Once this is done the genie will be out of the bottle for good, and they won't be able to take it back even if they wanted to. The hope, I'm certain, is that one day they will become irrelevant to the concepts of governance and regulation. They want to give up their say in what other people do, I think. At least, that's what I'd want if I was in their place. Being a dictator sucks for the guy in charge, too.
