At the Spring Teachers Conference in Bursa last weekend I showed participants some easy and free tools for creating web content and making our experience on the web more personal and productive. The tools are part of a technology shift called Web 2.0, which is a movement described by some as 'taking back the web."
However, sometimes 'taking back the web' isn't so easy, as can be seen in the 2006 Internet annual report by Reporters without Borders. According to the report, technologies developed in China to monitor and restrict web sites, blogs, and even web searches, are now being exported to other countries determined to decide what their citizens read, write or share.
Among the targets of criticism is the European Union, which passed a directive that makes Internet service providers ("ISPs") responsible if anyone uses their service illegally. This is analagous to making the telephone company responsible for illegal conversations, or the postal service responsible for the illegal content of letters. This directive forces ISPs to restrict their customers' free speech in order to avoid incrimination themselves, putting them in the roles of both police and judge. Will this lead to Blogger censors screening your blog posts before they can be published?
Another international organization that wishes we would trust them more, that is, the United Nations, is also looking for ways to protect us from thinking too much. BoingBoing reports that:
The UN's Intellectual Property Organization has reconvened to discuss a treaty that will kill innovative Internet audio/video offerings -- like podcasting, YouTube, Google Video, and Democracy Player -- in order to protect the business models of a few entrenched broadcasters.
One of the most important effects of Web 2.0 is that consumers of content become creators of content, and these creators thrive on the content of other amateur content creators. This threatens not only states who want to control content (that is, what you read and what you think), but also companies whose paradigm dictates that everything (including thoughts) must belong to someone, and cannot possibly belong to everyone.
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