Friday 31 Jul 2009 - 18:18Internet censorship in The Netherlands

Some lunatic judge here in Amsterdam decided to block access to a website for all Dutch users. Boy is he going to regret this ridiculously useless verdict! Ignoring the sheer technical impossibility of enforcing such 'boycot', let's see what lies at the heart of the verdict:

A private Dutch organisation (Stichting BREIN) managed to persuade legal authorities to block access to a bunch of servers in Sweden. In other words, if you're in The Netherlands, private organisations, with their own commercial agendas and for-profit priorities, now have control over what you can see and do online. Today it's blocking access to a site whose legality is questioned, tomorrow it's websites that criticize powerful corporations or question government policies.
Yet another very dangerous step towards full internet censorship where private organisations and uninformed lawmakers control the information we receive. The free spirit of the internet is being destroyed, one lawsuit at a time, and taking its place is a bland corporate-controlled regulated monstrosity, of which the information we're allowed to consume is sanitized and policed beforehand, by strangers, whose judgement needs to be accepted by all, blindly. Let's see what the results of this will be:

- Knowing the Dutch, they will not go along with this. Many will be furious about it, and lose respect, towards the justice system in general, and to the entertainment industrials (whatever was left of them..).
- Dutch users will find ways to avoid any type of geographical blocking system put in place on the internet. I, for one, will post the way I will be doing it using a cheap VPS in free country x and some nice squid configuration with a login on that VPS.
- Dutch users will ultimately become smarter online, technically harder to trace, harder to monitor, and impossible to control. Chased out of view, so to speak. Making this judge's decisions futile.
- Multitracked torrents and decentralised peer-to-peer traffic will grow in numbers, faster than they already do.
- Project Anon will thrive because of this.

I think I speak for most of us when I would like to say to that judge:
Face it; We, the people, will not let you decide what websites and servers on the internet we are allowed to access. We will do anything to avoid such types of control, and you will not be able to change that, ever.

The Dutch can
sign a petition