Friday, November 30, 2012

The Internet


Who Owns the Internet

The internet is a resource that belongs to everyone in the world. No one owns the internet and therefore it shouldn't be censored. It makes no sense to prohibit what you don’t own. However, certain types of people have exploited this policy and filled the internet with contents that are bad especially for children. Imagine your kid going to a porn site and some form of age verification is not requested. Wouldn't that be a disaster? That is why censoring the internet for specific people is the better that censoring whole websites for everyone. To understand this concept a little bit deeper, we must first know the concept of net neutrality.
The concept of “net neutrality" holds that companies providing Internet service should treat all sources of data equally. It has been the center of a debate over whether those companies can give preferential treatment to content providers who pay for faster transmission, or to their own content, in effect creating a two-tier Web, and about whether they can block or impede content representing controversial points of view[1].
As shown in the previous paragraph, companies decide whether to block a certain website and which content supplier has higher transmission. It’s all about the “benjamins.” Also a handful of companies own all of the internet cables and everything and therefore they give higher transmission to whoever is able to pay more money.
Laws regarding the internet in general should be made by every single person who uses the internet. There should be referendums held to decide what the majority of the people want. This way everyone but the internet companies is happy. However, laws regarding age or something similar should be common sense and therefore should be taken as they are (under 18... And the rest of it).
Finally, inappropriate things that are posted online should be censored by the government, not the ITU. The ITU is an international organization and to judge what’s inappropriate and what’s not, one must know the culture and the customs of the people and that is why the government is more suited determining what’s too inappropriate. However, there is a fine line between censoring government websites and censoring porn websites. Governments should only have the right to censor the latter. It doesn't have the right to judge people based on what they post and they should let the people know what they are censoring and why.




[1] (Net Neutrality)

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