Germany’s internet death
First and foremost, the internet is not dead in Germany, but it has been significantly shot last Thursday, the 18th June 2009. And this could lead to its death. What happened is following:
A politician named Ursula von der Leyen campaigned to install web blocks against child pornography. While the name of that package sounds honourable, if you look behind the proposed system, it is nothing else than a huge internet censorship infrastructure.
Ursula v.d. Leyen claims that the web blocks against child pornography will dampen the publisher’s profit.
Several organisations, including even charity organisations to protect and help abused children stated with facts that the proposed system is absolutely worthless, and also that the data v.d. Leyen relies on are without any facts.
The system will be installed using DNS blocks, and the responsibility to implement these blocks will lie with the ISPs.
Changing your DNS settings to use another DNS, such as those by openDNS, is easily done in a few seconds.
Even if you don’t know how, there’s a 27 second long youtube
video how to do it.
The video handles Windows only, Linux users however should know how to easily change it themselves.
Germany’s federal police, the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) is responsible for the blocking list. The problem here is, that the list is secret and uncontrolled, which means that anything could end up on the list.
This obviously is a huge infringement against basic human rights of freedom and information.
The law also does not state what will happen once the criminal media has been removed, i.e. if those IP addresses will be removed from the list or not.
The can of worms this opens is more than obvious.
The politicians responsible ignored facts brought to the table by computer / internet experts, by charities helping abused children, one of the hugest online petitions on a government web page as well as even a police commander from Stockholm, Sweden, who employ a similar system. He stated in an interview with a German magazine (Focus), that their system doesn’t help at all.
It didn’t even take a day yet after that law has been decided, that another politician, Thomas Strobl, spoke about extending that system to block “Killerspiele”, killer games.
German politicians have a huge problem with games, most notably first person shooter. In their claims these games are responsible for people murdering their fellow students in schools, such as in Winnenden.
Yet another area where politicians simply ignore their people they should be governing as well as facts by psychologist and others who studied the effects of gaming on people.
Also waiting in the line to get more blocks enlisted are obviously media publishers, notably music and videos. Not surprising.
This all smells like Stasi 2.0, with the politician Wolfgang Schäuble behind it all, which is not surprising either. Another not surprising occasion is, that the above mentioned politician who spoke about censoring internet pages of so called “killer games” is Schäuble’s son-in-law.
