Next to talking with another human being, the Internet is as close as you get to a completely free Information source. There are literally millions of websites and people on-line at any one time, all sharing news and talk in one way or another. In effect, the Internet is the world's biggest public information source and it's one that around 35% of the world uses on a regular basis.

What would it be like if your access were restricted to the point that everything you see was policed and you had to pay a fee to see certain things. It'd be like 'censoring' one of your friends so that they could no longer say certain specific words or phrases and show parts of their bodies. As such the modern day Internet is considered to be a 'free and unrestricted' place where people can be who they really are without restraint.

Anything from swearing at another without consequence or exposing yourself to the rigours of a web cam, it's all here. However as the years move on the political might of world dominating super powers and governments are increasingly pushing us the wrong way.

So much so that in the period of as little as five years the Internet could be under a serious censorship ruling, ISPreview investigates.

Privacy lost

Privacy and Censorship are two of the same, have one and the other is sure to follow as both carry a similar array of rules, albeit grammatically different. It'd be a shock for people to learn, but our own government (UK) already has the power to read every E-Mail and intercept any file. In essence they can know what you're doing, when you're doing it and more often than not, whom you're doing it with.

The system is already actively used to monitor criminals and it only takes a matter of moments to get the exact 'source location' for any connection. So if you're a hacker and logged onto an ISP in the UK, you'd better know how to cover your tracks better than just bouncing Idents and IPs around to fake your information, which simply doesn't help with the new system.

Fare enough, a system to monitor on-line criminals, but how long before it's pointing at one of us in order to police invoked censorship? It could be sooner than you think; all the major governments of the world have already tried several times to invoke stronger restrictions, yet failed. That's not to say they won't win tomorrow and by the looks of things that day is edging ever closer.

What's to Censor?

Who couldn't have failed to notice the big 'Demon Internet' trial, in which one forum user posted a message that was 'slanderous and abusive' to another. The forum wasn't under Demons direct control, so when the user who was not a part of Demon Internet asked for it to be removed, they couldn't. After going to court Demon were fined and finally able to remove the post. Most of you will look at this and say, "Hmm so what's the problem?". The problem didn't come from the key issue of the trial but for the possible implications it could have in the future.

The precedent that was set in the Demon trial is very worrying. Many smaller ISPs who are unable to risk court action on cost grounds will be forced to remove any offending material from their servers even if a subsequent court case may exonerate them entirely. This is, in effect, forcing ISPs to act as censors whenever they receive a complaint from a user. In addition, recent successful action by RIAA against mp3.com has serious implications for any ISP who hosts, albeit unwittingly, material which may contravene copyright laws.

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