Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications is considering implementing a system whereby visitors to a list of government proscribed sites would have their access restricted to a warning message, in much the same way as with China and elsewhere.
Their ostensible aim is a crackdown on sites serving pornography featuring under-age participants.
The measures, which are currently being moved towards the experimental phase, would involve forwarding the requestor of a verboten URL to a page explaining that access is restricted (an unspecified “etc.” is also mentioned).
The same censorship technology is apparently already in use in ten mainly European nations, where anti-pornography laws are much broader in extent (if we except the mosaic laws in Japan); recall that a full ban on all “violent” pornography is due to come into force in the UK soon, and in a number of places various types of drawn images are also illegal. A ban on 2D loli images is also being explored in Japan.
What a simple matter it would be to expand the coverage of online censorship in such cases to include all such material, and beyond, using this kind of infrastructure.
Via Yomiuri.
ISPs are also likely to be groaning over this latest measure – the previous law requiring access for minors to be restricted came essentially without any warning or industry consultation, and made considerable demands of them.
The request for them to participate in trials of the censorship infrastructure may not necessarily mean the ministry has any intention of heeding technical objections, but on the other hand it may offer ISPs a chance to ameliorate technically illiterate political demands – whatever the case, it is a difficult position for ISPs, who generally stand only to lose money from such systems.
We do not hear if they have anything more than a simple blacklist in mind – presumably such measures would be easily circumvented, as is visible in the case of China and similar, and they do not address at all the question of encrypted P2P communications (though unencrypted P2P is already being targeted). To say nothing of what is quite legally provided…
This isn’t about banning cp. Gov’t higher-ups aren’t stupid. They know that banning will push it underground even further. (Bootlegging, drug-trade, prostitution etc..) This is about controlling the internet. If they gave a damn about kids they wouldn’t inject mercury-laden inoculations into 2 year olds. The pretext that everything bad on the internet is a reason to block it is the same pretext used to censor any medium. It doesn’t mean that’s what it’s for, it’s just the reason given to avoid backlash. If they said “We want to ban the internet so that people won’t find out as easily when we pull the biggest financial heist against decent and hard-working people”, they wouldn’t have as many fundamentalist morons waving flags and guns.
Its bad enough they censor porn…but now the internet…..serious note why censor porn?
Tyranny and dictatorship are the natural results of limiting information! Someone, somewhere, will always find something offensive — mimes for example. Those things scare the living hell out of me. But should we ban them? No! Free the internet! We have nothing to fear from free information but pop-up advertising!
This will never work as long as these politics keep thinking the Internet is like a big truck, when it’s actually a series of tubes!
Jokes aside, that analogy is somewhat correct as the whole Internet infrastructure is a big network of connections between computers. Independently controlled computers. There’s no such thing as effective content control with this model.
Perhaps these censors’ ideal of Internet would be a huge government-controlled server farm to which users could connect and interact, without enabling actual direct communication between the clients.
Wait… I think I just accidentally defined Usenet… (?)
If this plan indeed pushes through, that won’t stop 2D l♥♥i enthusiasts and will find ways to circumvent it.
No one could stop the internet.