Europe council unanimously decide to "block websites", enabling web censorship

http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_data/docs/pressdata/en/jha/130727.pdf

by lloeki • 14 years ago

15 8 14 years ago

consilium.europa.eu

puivert2• 14 years ago

This doc doesn't say that.

lloeki3• 14 years ago

    2. Reducing as much as possible the availability of child pornography online, inter alia by 
    facilitating measures to remove or, where appropriate, _block websites containing child 
    pornography_, and reducing as much as possible the re-victimization of children whose 
    sexual abuse is depicted in child pornography

Whether you are in favor or against it, and whether the content is moral or not, actively preventing content to be accessible is censorship. If anything, it requires a blocking infrastructure to be put in place.

error• 14 years ago

Any sane person does NOT see anything wrong with that paragraph, that is probably a paragraph that will convince anyone that putting such rules is for the best.

Well maybe not everyone, I guess pedophiles will be very disappointed and will play the card of freedom to convince otherwise.

puivert2• 14 years ago

But they haven't decided to block, quoted bit is just a proposed agenda item for some "global alliance" thing.

fchollet• 14 years ago

As long as a court order is required, then this seems to me to be more of a freedom-protecting measure than a freedom-destroying one. Freedom is not about the absence of enforcement, it is about having reasonably just laws, and processes that ensure the law will be enforced reasonably justly.

lloeki3• 14 years ago

Actively blocking websites requires some infrastructure to be in place, and the underlying fear is that this infrastructure gets abused at some point, whether by introduction of new laws or unintentionally through bribery or incompetence. The previous french President Sarkozy was actively looking at putting much more than child pornography in such blocking systems, in very vague and worrisome wordings of which a translation could be "along with any illegal or order-troubling website".

Also, the worry is that the risk and cost of such an infrastructure is too high, especially considering the target has already moved and such blocks are completely inefficient.

Ironically, just at the time when European MPs decided that any form of censorship is bad and net neutrality matters, council turns around.

PS: When submitting the link I tried to be as neutral as possible within the 80 chars limit, precisely to spur constructive discussion.

keymone• 14 years ago

when submitting this link you tried to be as sensational as possible. good job.. web censorship infrastructures are already in place everywhere, the fact that you need court order to make use of it is what really matters.

Europe council unanimously decide to "block websites", enabling web censorship

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