The Communications Decency Act was passed in 1996. The goal was to protect children from harmful content on the Internet, which sounds great in theory but turns out to be terribly difficult to implement in practice. Many groups believed that the CDA was overly vague and could restrict all sorts of legitimate speech between adults, [...]
Is the Internet reshaping Chinese culture?
Excited and emboldened by the wealth of information they find on the Internet, Chinese teens are breaking centuries of tradition to challenge their teachers and express their own opinions in class. Wearing jerseys emblazoned with the names of European soccer stars, downloading weekly episodes of “Prison Break,” listening to 50 [...]
“Yahoo is dismayed that citizens in China have been imprisoned for expressing their political views on the Internet,” Yahoo said in a statement faxed to the Associated Press. The company went on to deplore “punishment of any activity internationally recognized as free expression.”…Not that the declaration changes anything; Yahoo plans to keep turning over information [...]
An opposition Venezuelan television station whose broadcast license has not been renewed by the government is now turning to YouTube to get its message out after its transmitter was taken over by a state-run channel. Hugo Chavez’s “Bolivarian Revolution” has no time for media groups that criticize his government; Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV) is now [...]
On Monday, the US Department of Defense announced that a number of social networking and media sites would be blocked on its network, citing bandwidth concerns. “This is a bandwidth and network management issue. We’ve got to have the networks open to do our mission….For their part, YouTube isn’t accepting the ban without a fight. [...]
The level of state-led censorship of the net is growing around the world, a study of so-called internet filtering by the Open Net Initiative suggests. The study of thousands of websites across 120 Internet Service Providers found 25 of 41 countries surveyed showed evidence of content filtering….The filtering had three primary rationales, according to the [...]
No more using the military’s computer system to socialize and trade videos on MySpace, YouTube and more than a dozen others Web sites, the Pentagon says. Citing security concerns and technological limits, the Pentagon has cut off access to those sites for personnel using the Defense Department’s computer network. The change limits use of the [...]
