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Comment by nextparadigms | Hacker News Reader

It seems that politicians all over the world are starting to really press this issue, and even get the press to promote these ideas for them. I don't think they realize what they are about to start here. I think they underestimate how much people want the Internet to remain free, and how many want it to remain free. I feel the next few years will be very interesting.

The TechDirt post was referring to this article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/26/internet...

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I think the last year has been interesting. In it we've seen 3 strikes legislation undemocratically thrown onto the UK books with as good as no worthwhile debate, the USA starting to arbitrarily abuse their control of DNS, etc.

People just don't give a damn until they realise what they've lost. Certainly techies are more and more getting turned against business & government by this, but the ordinary person ... as long as they can give all their personal info to Facebook, play videos on Youtube, and so forth, they won't care and I can't blame them.

I think you give people too much credit. People don't see the Internet as the new printing press. They see it as an improved entertainment device.

Ask your local small business owner how much they appreciate being able to have their own website. Previously their options for letting people know about their business were newspaper advertising, yellow pages or TV.

Oh, don't worry, your website license will be part of a business registration package.

Most people consider such things a minor inconvenience.

In China you already have to apply for a website license (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICP_license). And most people do not care about it very much. I once made a site with a friend from China, and he applied for the ICP license, even though the server was in the US and there was not a single word in Chinese on the site. In my friend's opinion it was a natural thing to do for a law abiding citizen.

China is a North American politician's wet dream.

You might be surprised at how hard a sell web presence is in some areas...sigh

Agreed. This needs to be kept at the forefront of geek's minds: Farmville, Facebook, Hulu, and Twitter (and other entertainment devices) are the Internet. So long as the entertainment (circuses) flows, the masses will be happy. Regardless of what regulation happens!

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