Internet Censorship by Obama

There is already a lot of censorship on the Internet and there will be a lot more. This blog article already gave some prediction about the direction of the Internet and government control over it. We have seen a lot of direct censorship so far. China and UAE are typical examples. These countries filter internet traffic and don't allow pages from certain sites to enter the country. If you try to see photos on the popular Flickr site in Dubai you will get a "Not allowed due to inappropriate content" message sent to you, thanks to the local government. YouTube and Skype are blocked as well in the city of the world's tallest skyscraper. Burma is known to have turned the internet off completely during unrest and times of protests against the government.

Censorship, corporate as well as governmental, also exists in the US. Now Obama is requiring and enforcing reverse censorship, prohibiting information to leave the country. Read all about it this article entitled "Obama enforces trade embargo against open source". In this case the US government disallows the world's leading open source site Sourceforge to deliver content to blacklisted countries named by the US government. So, if you live in Syria and your profession is school teacher and you would like to download some open source educational software from Sourceforge, Sourceforge as required by US regulation must return an "access denied, forebidden" message. As one can see governments and corporations can be very inventive to control the internet or the use and distribution of open source software. More resources in internet censorship: Wikipedia, Wikia and Cship.

We are standing only at the very beginning of control and regulation of the Internet. How does the song go: You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet.