Arun Mehta wrote:
and India will be too: the law here holds the ISPs responsible for ensuring that nothing objectionable and obscene is carried by them, and what simpler way to comply than to
FWIW: "There is no need to licence content providers; Internet service providers are not responsible for illegal content." R K Takkar, Indian Telecom Secretary (at the time of interview); see http://dxm.org/techonomist/news/ndp1.html for more.
Ideally, I should be able to send via pgp and anonymous remailer a request for a page, which would soon come beamed down unencrypted via satellite. No more waiting hours for the latest version of Netscape to download
(!) you'll only have to wait hours for your anonymous-remailer-web-to-e-mail gateway, EVERY time you want a page. In one of my Electric Dreams columns, "Censorship is bad for business," (archived here and there on the Web) I wrote that governments will eventually see sense and stop censorship, if they're interested in making their countries rich. Singapore in every other field of work has shown its interest in deregulation; I would expect them to do so on the Net as well, when it becomes clear that there's rather more to it than porn and subversion. In the meanwhile, there's not much point trying to "help" them, apart from providing moral support. Incidentally, do the cypherpunk archives in Singapore, which always come out first in my AltaVista searches, not contain a trace of officially disliked content? In this month's First Monday, due out tomorrow, Andreas Harsono - a banned Indonesian journalist who reports from Jakarta through the Internet for various foreign publications - writes on censorship in S-E Asia, and how some countries, like Indonesia, are _more_ relaxed in their treatment of on-line media than the press. Best, Rishab ps. I don't read the list regularly, so reply by mail if you want a response. First Monday - The Peer-Reviewed Journal on the Internet http://www.firstmonday.dk/ Munksgaard International Publishers, Copenhagen International Editor - Rishab Aiyer Ghosh (rishab@dxm.org) Pager +91 11 9622 162187; Fax +91 11 2209608 or 2426453 or 2224058 A4/204 Ekta Vihar, 9 Indraprastha Extn, New Delhi 110092 INDIA