US is set to censor internet

[Ali Quadir]

edit: the only absolute weakness I see is that internet access is in the hands of ISPs, who could - if laws permit - charge insane amounts of money, with slower speeds, thereby discouraging non-essential internet activites. the solution would be creating a new global data exchange network, a task that becomes more feasible over time as technology advances and becomes cheaper. where there's a will there's a way.

That's an idea indeed... Before the internet there was already something like global mail...

You'd have a mail client running on your local system. And it would push it's mail to a peer over a modem to modem phone line connection. Receiving what the other side has queued up for him. It took a week as most systems only had daily synchronizations to reduce costs, but e-mail did arrive on the other side of the world through this relatively low tech civilian network.

But more importantly if prices per megabyte were to skyrocket on the regular web this would bankrupt many businesses who are today totally dependent on the web. And even totalitarian fascist regimes are sensitive to that. Since any kind of connection would theoretically enable the transfer of encrypted data it becomes impossible to exclude this without shutting down the entire web. This is why they have no effective anti worm technology apart from shielding every client computer.

So what they're doing essentially only hurts business and individuals who are not that tech savvy. And that's a possibility since the politicians are often not savvy enough to realize this. But at least it means many businesses will lobby to keep the lines open.