Other people have reported it as well: Belgium has started censoring the Internet.
This raises a couple of questions:
- Who decides which sites get blocked?
- Which sites are currently on the blocked list?
- How do you get off the list?
From a technical point of view, the censoring is trivial to circumvent (through OpenDNS for example) but the fact that they (whoever 'they' are) are willing to start censoring the Internet is worrisome.
A very slippery rope...
2 Comments
It is a particularly
Submitted by Nick Hofstede on
It is a particularly slippery slope for the internet providers.
As soon as they show that they can block certain traffic and aren't merely carriers of data, other people will demand the blocking of other illegal sites and content.
If it is shown that they can block traffic to illegal sites (gambling, child porn, ...) or illegal content (movies, music, ...) but don't, they might be considered accomplices.
Looks like the federal government just gave the providers enough rope to hang themselves, and at least some of them were happy to oblige.
Hmm. Worrying, even on a
Submitted by Bram on
Hmm. Worrying, even on a constitutional level. Pretty sure the Belgian constitution states, explicitly, that censorship is not an option. Sure, this was intended for the written press, but this silly little legal system seems to think bloggers are journalists as well, so there might not be a very clear-cut boundary..
Messing with DNS is pretty nasty as well. What kind of schmuck willingly has their DNS server lie? It's already a broken system which is hard to trust. This only breaks it further.
What I want to know is:
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