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Theresa May to create new internet controlled and regulated by government

347 points by jakub_g 9y ago

marcusarmstrong 9y ago
This is terrifying.
wodencafe 9y ago
What could they possibly be thinking? Nobody wants this, except the gov't.
- kobeya 9y ago
  I believe you answered your own question.
notliketherest 9y ago
This is one of the most overtly authoritarian proposals for internet regulation I've ever heard from a democratic, Western nation. How in the hell are the people of the UK supporting something like this? As an American who cherishes liberty and freedom, I'm shocked that anyone could support these laws in the UK. They are straight up Orwellian...
- CiaranMcNulty 9y ago
  Whether we are supporting it or not remains to be seen. May has always had this authoritarian streak but rose to the office of Prime Minister without being elected. Sadly this is unlikely to become a key issue in the forthcoming election, so an attempt at implementation is likely and we'll end up 'supporting' it passively by voting for the proposers.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >Whether we are supporting it or not remains to be seen. After living quietly with 24/7 cctv monitoring, all kinds of anti-privacy laws, etc, it's not like it's a real nail-biting mystery this one...
- jansho 9y ago
  We've just become very passive. No one makes a noise about being the most CCTV-ed nation in the world. Even when the leaks about the true nature of GCHQ surveillance came out, there wasn't much rage in the streets. I guess we are all secretly OK with it. "You shouldn't worry, unless you have something to hide."
  - spaceribs 9y ago
    I was thinking about this in relation to the pirate radio history of the UK. Maybe people are apathetic because everyone knows no matter how "Nanny State" things get, smart people can skirt their draconian tendencies no matter what? If the more fascist members of society are placated by technical placebos, why not allow them to pretend they are actually in control of the "situation"? I'm personally keeping a close eye on lifi. In the US the FCC restrictions on the range of wifi networks restricts mesh networking substantially. If it's just invisible gigabit light communication from rooftop to rooftop, it could be a huge gamechanger.
    - mattnewton 9y ago
      I don't think this is a real solution. I need to talk to my friends and family privately without installing conspicious hardware on their house. The right to encrypt and the right to privacy too are precedents that need to be defended, otherwise as soon as the law catches up and learns about the loophole, it will be closed quickly.
      - spaceribs 9y ago
        Sorry if I gave you the impression that it was a solution! What I'm saying is that the technical cat is already out of the bag, we're already moving forward with stronger encryption and a multilayered internet. Adding restrictions on the ISP level just creates a market to get around that restriction, be it mesh networks, li-fi, or low earth orbit satellites.
  - rogerbinns 9y ago
    Do people in the UK see the police as adversarial, like they do in the US? To me (a perception) it seems like US police are expected to act disproportionately and have the system on their side. See for example advice on never talking to them, profiling, civil asset seizures, swat raids, plea bargains etc. It doesn't seem like UK police are seen the same way or even close. CCTV and internet control are additional tools for them.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >As an American who cherishes liberty and freedom, I'm shocked that anyone could support these laws in the UK. They are straight up Orwellian... Well, those (liberty and freedom) are mostly cherished in lip service by most, and only when it comes to government. Otherwise, few bat an eye that between them Google and Facebook (and perhaps 2-3 other players) control and have access to 90% of what people do on the internet. And that they also sleep with their government for their nation's interests.
  - mattnewton 9y ago
    >Otherwise, few bat an eye that between them Google and Facebook (and perhaps 2-3 other players) Big difference there between the one government that can put you in jail and you cannot divorce without leaving the country (sometimes not even then), and some fragmented web services you can point your browser in a different place. Enormous, meaningful difference worth fighting over.
    - codedokode 9y ago
      What prevents Google and Facebook from sharing data with the government? Especially if nobody would know about it?
      - allover 9y ago
        I can choose not to use/give meaningful data to Google and Facebook, but I don't get to opt out of elected government. I agree with GPP that the 2 aren't really comparable.
        coldtea 9y ago
        >I can choose not to use/give meaningful data to Google and Facebook Between Google Ads on tons of site, their Google Analytics in tons of sites, your friends sharing stuff, photos etc with you on Facebook, your friends receiving your messages on their Gmail account, and the several other (differently branded) services they own, not to mention sites hosted by them on GAE and such, sites serving you Google Web Fonts, etc, you don't really have much choice... Especially with Google being the only game in town for quality search results.
- rorygreen 9y ago
  As a person from and living in the UK, I'm equally shocked and appalled as you. Everybody I know is baffled by and vehemently against these ridiculous proposals. Quite frankly I have no idea who is voting for the Conservatives. Anybody with half a brain cell and not pushing an evil agenda seems to despise the Conservative party. (I'm sure there are some reasonable Tory supporters out there, I've never met them though. I also think in this current sociopolitical climate it's plain dangerous to vote for the Conservatives, even if you believe you have good reasons to support them.) As a country, we've lost faith in politics and I fully expect this to be demonstrated by a very low turnout for the general election in June. The issue with this is we currently have no strong enough opposition to the Tories (thanks to an incredibly effective smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour party, led by the media and perpetuated by the Labour MPs themselves) so will end up with an even greater Conservative majority and another 5 years of this dystopian madness. I very much hope I'm proven wrong. I'd be happy to elaborate on some of these points if you're interested; I have a few theories about what is currently going on and what has led us here. It is both very interesting and incredibly upsetting to observe and analyse the state of politics in this country at the moment. Edit: I should state that I am not a Labour party supporter, I was just trying to give a vague overview of the state of our politics at the moment.
  - keithpeter 9y ago
    I suspect that most people decide who to vote for based on money, trust on things like jobs, and fear of unemployment &c. I don't think internet policy comes into the decision really for people who don't follow these things and who are not technical. UK: anyone got a good simple page I can point neighbours at about why this should be an election issue?
  - mike-cardwell 9y ago
    This issue is deeper than party politics. You can blame the Tories, but the Labour party gave us RIPA. They're just as bad, if not worse. It does not matter which political party is in power at the moment, they all want to increase surveillance. And if they say they don't want to before they get into power, they seem to change their tune for some reason once they're in.
- mike-cardwell 9y ago
  As an American who cherishes liberty and freedom, your relationships, conversations, location and political opinions are tracked, logged, and available to your government.
- AJ007 9y ago
  We can't forget that the whole purpose of the internet is decentralization. Perhaps if authoritarian regimes are able to regulate it, that is a sign things have become too centralized. The more chilling question is why is a Western democracy trying to copy the frameworks of China, the UAE, and other crumbling regimes? This feels like a shadow of the Cold War where certain people believed that the US would fail because capitalism was weaker than communism (parallels abound.)
  - Lordarminius 9y ago
    I agree with all your points except to point out that CCCP is not a "crumbling regime" and a little reflection would indicate why we should not even wish it to be one.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  How in the hell are the people of the UK supporting something like this? Firstly, a lot of people know little if anything about what's going on. They're quite understandably more concerned about high profile issues like Brexit and the collapsing NHS and trains that don't run so they can't get to work and the cost of their kid going to university. The mainstream media is also more concerned with those things. Secondly, even those who do have some idea of what's going on overall support authoritarian measures if those measures are presented as providing necessary tools to the police and security services to combat serious crime and terrorism, and of course they always are presented that way. When normal people are asked about the actual measures in the laws, for example about all the different government organisations that now have powers to access surveillance data and all the different purposes they can use it for, a lot of people do have significant reservations or even object strongly. But we still tend to trust our government organisations to basically do the right thing in this country, for better or worse, and so supporting the police and security services with new powers is a vote-winner.
- snowwolf 9y ago
  Normally the conservatives would never be able to push this authoritarian agenda so openly, but a unique set of circumstances has given them the opening to push through some of their most extreme objectives. The Conservatives are the only mainstream party promising to follow through with Brexit, and Labour have disintegrated under the 'leadership' of Jeremy Corbyn. This means that many traditional Labour voters are willing to vote Conservative to ensure they get their Brexit, regardless of whatever else the Tories are putting forwards in their manifesto. They've can basically put whatever they want in their manifesto and people will still vote for them to ensure Brexit happens - that's how determined the Leave voters are. Current polls (although we know how reliable those are) suggest the Tories will take over 400 seats at the general election, giving them absolute control of the government with no other party able to oppose them.
  - vidarh 9y ago
    As much as things are looking bad, saying Labour has disintegrated under Corbyn is a truth with severe modifications. Labour is currently polling higher than Ed Milliband was, and has been steadily improving. The biggest problem now is not that Labour has disintegrated, though the infighting certainly have not made things easy, but that UKIP and the Lib Dems have been disintegrating, and UKIP voters in particular appears to be largely going Tory. Labour might lose a lot of seats based on current polling, but that is more down to a blatantly undemocratic electoral system than to how the party is polling.
    - ed_blackburn 9y ago
      The Conservatives have stolen UKIPs voters by swinging them to the right. They've been able to do this with impunity, in part because of the Labour Leadership, whilst supported on a level I've never seen before in terms of passion, it is frankly not universally popular enough. The only metric you can measure against is how many seats a party wins by. Will Corbyn build on Milliband, or fair worse? I speak to some hardcore Corbyn supports and their passion is incredible, but alas, only one person get a vote and for all someone passion a pensioner will vote Conservative out of habit and inertia.
- IanDrake 9y ago
  "Are you on the side of the terrorists and child pornographers?" That is how resistance will be framed and it could play just as well here, but I hope I'm wrong.
- hollander 9y ago
  Maybe it's the cue to vote for the other party, which will mean the end of Brexit?
Maken 9y ago
While I can understand some of the arguments in favour of regulating internet content, it amazes me people are still talking about pornography like some ancient demon from which our children must be protected at all costs. Does anybody still buy that rhetoric in this day and age?
- Maken 9y ago
  Also, wasn't one of the reasons behind the Brexit that the European courts were blocking this kind of legislation?
  - foldr 9y ago
    No? I don't think anyone mentioned regulations on pornography during the campaign.
    - Maken 9y ago
      I don't know if it was explicitly part of the campaign, but UK's government was one of the biggest blockers on European Union's net neutrality laws. Also, the conservatives mentioned the interference of the European Court of Human Rights and its ability to override sentences inside of the UK as one of the reasons they wanted to leave the EU.
- mamon 9y ago
  [...]pornography like some ancient demon[...] Given the amount of psychological damage inflicted by pornography that comparison seems pretty accurate.
  - smsm42 9y ago
    You mean like both are imaginary entities which have real-life consequences only if you believe highly questionable accounts of people who stand to profit a lot if you do believe them, but still offer no objective proof?
  - blackguardx 9y ago
mcphage 9y ago
Step 1. Make a new, secure internet so that terrorists can't operate secretly. Step 2. Make terrorists use that internet. Hmm... I'm detecting a problem with this plan...
- hxegon 9y ago
  Nah bruh it'll work just give me authority over your online rights
  - mcphage 9y ago
    Later: Well, that didn't work.
thegeomaster 9y ago
This reads like an April Fool's prank. They say that people should be protected from "harmful content", which somehow includes pornography? Is it the 80s again? The rhetoric here sounds like it's coming from the distant past, when government officials were completely out of touch with the way ordinary people use new technology. Now it just looks like a blatant attempt to score "anti-terrorism" points and regulate the shit out of an industry in draconian ways, just for the sake of regulating it (what are the possible motives, besides the laughable "we don't want to provide safe space for terrorists to communicate" claim?) Are people actually supporting this kind of thinking?
- kobeya 9y ago
  I suspect harmful content here also include ISIS recruiting.
- noir_lord 9y ago
  > The rhetoric here sounds like it's coming from the distant past. May was an authoritarian home secretary who was raised (and is a practising) Christian (iirc her dad was a vicar). She's a one-woman Morality Police (in her head at least).
  - Doctor_Fegg 9y ago
    Ironically her father's former home church is now signed up to the Inclusive Church movement, a progressive, tolerant movement which is the opposite of her xenophobic conservatism. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_Church https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_Church
- jaclaz 9y ago
  Maybe you meant the 70's? The '80's were pretty much liberal AFAICR (in the rest of Europe), the UK has always had some "special rules", guess which country is yellow among all the green in this map? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_by_region https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_by_region From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_the_United_King... >The UK has a markedly different tradition of pornography regulation from that found in most other Western countries, which legalised hardcore pornography during the 1960s and 1970s. By contrast the UK was almost the only liberal democracy not to do so.
oneplane 9y ago
This will neither work nor result in the expected results. The lines stating that online would be governed the same way as offline life, and access to 'bad' materials would be 'just as hard' shows how disconnected from reality that idea is. Access to violence, hate, porn etc. isn't "harder" offline, and bullying on playgrounds isn't actually getting "fixed" at the moment, just it it won't be online. The whole irony is that if the online rules would be implemented and resulting in the same things as offline life, the internet would pretty much remain as-is. Of course, the law and the rules would be allowing for more legal spying and detaining, as well as controlling official narrative, which would have nothing to do with online or offline life and is a whole new thing added on top of the current policy. I hope that if we can just hold off on the crazy orwellian plans and ideas long enough for the old cluster of people in high places to die (of old age), we might actually be able to get the good stuff we created online to actually start fixing the offline problems in governing. That will never happen with the old style people in place, and only time will fix that, since they won't go freely as power is addictive and corrupting (as always).
- goodplay 9y ago
  > (of old age) I find the need to add this qualifier sad. Normally, any rational adult (children even) would be able to correctly infer your intent from the context, but given how things are these days and the crazy laws being passed, I certainly don't blame you for feeling the need to be specific. See the particularly sad "Special note to law-enforcement agents" on https://sphincs.cr.yp.to/ https://sphincs.cr.yp.to/ . I can't help but feel that things are taking a turn for the worse.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >I hope that if we can just hold off on the crazy orwellian plans and ideas long enough for the old cluster of people in high places to die (of old age) The phenomenon has nothing much to do with "age". The old people running stuff today said the same thing for the "old timers" (Nixon etc) when they were young, and lots of them were themselves were 60s hippies, rebels, revolutionaries, etc when they were young. See how they turned out? It's not that new generations bring more liberal people, and not even that age changes you. It's power and interests that come into play. Which young persons don't have much, in the same way they don't have a seat in the senate. And when (a few) do, they can be as conservative/exploitive/etc as any 80 year old politician or CEO, etc.
sscarduzio 9y ago
Makes me giggle when people try to enforce policies about the internet without knowing anything about internet.
- kobeya 9y ago
  ...like all the countries in the world that do maintain such border filters?
- gaius 9y ago
  Makes me giggle when people think "the Internet" can do a damn thing about people with direct physical access to the submarine cables who buy servers and storage by the acre...
mschuster91 9y ago
As much as I'd like to say "hey Brits, come on and move to Germany as long as you still can", our own government is going way down the authoritarian route, too. Not that extreme as in the UK, yes, but still - our secret services and the police got awarded the right to automatically access our ID card photography. What this means is that e.g. at demonstrations they can pull up a camera van and have everyone identified in real time - as any form of masking is forbidden by law since the RAF days. When you're on social support, government may access your entire bank account data including transactions, at will and use everything they find to make your life even more miserable than it already is. When you're a refugee, immigration offices are now allowed and equipped to forensically examine your cell phone to determine "if you tell the truth", plus you have your fingerprints and biometric photos taken. First they came for the jobless, then the refugees, ... the path which many countries these days are going is a very dark one and I am not sure if democratic processes will allow a push back or if it will need massive civil unrest.
- MichaelGG 9y ago
  >When you're a refugee, immigration offices are now allowed and equipped to forensically examine your cell phone to determine "if you tell the truth", plus you have your fingerprints and biometric photos taken. ... What's wrong with inspecting their stories and taking biometrics? Just believing people that are obviously in their 20s claiming to be teens is one reason people are becoming anti immigration. Just cause someone shows up in the EU cause their country sucks doesn't mean they should just be let in without any scrutiny. ProTip: Most people in such countries would prefer to live in the EU/Canada/US. Blindly believing and letting in anyone damages efforts to admit people who actually are at risk. Coming in as a refugee is declaring your country of origin has totally failed and you're availing of the mercy of others, of which you might never be able to repay. Getting scanned to make sure you're not gaming the system seems like a trivial price to pay.
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    > ... What's wrong with inspecting their stories and taking biometrics? "inspecting their stories" in this case is violating their human right to privacy. Taking biometric photos is fine if used only (!) for checking of multiple applications, but not to submit them to the police databases - as this puts refugees under a general suspicion of being future criminals. > Getting scanned to make sure you're not gaming the system seems like a trivial price to pay. The issue is: it's easy to break the dam in regard to human rights for refugees following your line of thought. When measures like this are enacted for refugees, usually no one cares until politicians say "we already have this for refugees/homeless/jobless/other bottom group, so why not extend it to soccer fans/left wing people/the general population". And by the time the "expansion racket" has arrived at "the general population" there is no more real resistance. This is why weakening of human rights is something that should result in jailtime for the politicians involved.
lossolo 9y ago
It's funny when people that do not have any idea about technology wants to regulate Internet. Someone can just use application developed in other country, what they will do ? block the site on ISP level? People will link to thousands other sites that will have binaries of this application on facebook/twitter/any other site. They can't even handle piracy and they think that they can control whole Internet? When I hear that kind of proposals I always have this picture in my mind: https://torrentfreak.com/images/blocktpb1.jpg https://torrentfreak.com/images/blocktpb1.jpg
- wyck 9y ago
  The technology exists to firewall entire countries, afterall the ISP's connect to the larger "pipes", this has already happened in several countries. Sure you could probably tunnel a connection but the average person certainly can't, this fractures the internet.
adamnemecek 9y ago
I've always thought that Theresa May should have more of a say in what I do online. Who else than Theresa would know what's best for me.
- m0nty 9y ago
  Paul Dacre?
  - noir_lord 9y ago
    Is there a difference? Ones the monkey the other the organ grinder, I leave it to you to decide which is which.
paradite 9y ago
Yesterday's discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14374533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14374533
kobeya 9y ago
I'm thankful Hong Kong is now part of China so they can keep their fair and open Internet. What a weird world we live in.
- solotronics 9y ago
  internet in HK is different from mainland China internet
  - hedora 9y ago
    Moving forward, would it still be that different from mainland China if HK were part of the UK?
  - kobeya 9y ago
    Yes... my comment wouldn't make much sense if that wasn't the case.
deleted 9y ago
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azinman2 9y ago
I know this is the independent, but is this for real? It sounds like a prank, straight out of the movie Brazil especially with the whole terrorist motivation. And in the U.K.?!
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
  The headline claims that Theresa May "wants to create a new internet" but there's nothing in the story to actually back up that claim. A "new internet" would involve new infrastructure, ISPs, DNS servers, hosting companies etc. which seems pretty far fetched. Of course, that doesn't detract from the (potentially very scary) reality of the situation.
microcolonel 9y ago
This is the problem with letting Labour be held hostage by one out-of-touch lunatic. You get an election where the Conservatives hold all of the cards, and can do basically anything they please as long as Jeremy Corbyn is the opposition. Labour is so out of touch that even this draconian, insane law will probably not stop people from voting Conservative this time around. Labour has allowed itself to be infiltrated by antisemites and radical socialists, and nobody in Britain is voting for that.
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
  It's like our own version of the "nobody likes Hillary so I guess we'll vote Trump" situation. Difference here being that most of the media is anti-Corbyn which will tip the balance even further.
- ygaf 9y ago
  We've got the Lib Dems; no matter how ineffectual a Lib Dem vote ostensibly is, you're not having to choose one of the other two.
DrNuke 9y ago
Can't see the scandal, we are being eaten alive daily by big corps for profit and surrendering them our entire national and supranational infrstructures, so govs should really try and get control back. Do you really think Zuckerberg, Brin, Bezos, Microsoft and Cook are better than May & co.? That said, the other extreme is North Korea, so we know what to expect, eventually.
- ryanx435 9y ago
  each of those companies/CEO's you listed control a subset of sites on the internet. May wants to control the entirety of sites on the internet. if you can't see the difference, than I don't know what to say to you.
msmm 9y ago
As a someone who lived in abusive relationship with a control freak this manifesto scares me.
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iamben 9y ago
I'd be curious to see what would happen if Mindgeek (owners of pornhub, etc) put a banner at the top of their websites for British visitors saying "your access to pornography is under threat" or similar. I wonder what effect they would/could have on British voters, based on the sheer amount of traffic they get (and the fact that a considerable amount of people enjoy how easy it is to look at porn, whether they admit it or not).
- noir_lord 9y ago
  That's actually a really good idea, it'd also be in there interest to do so since the UK makes up a good chunk of their users. We do like our porn.
Animats 9y ago
The UK leadership seems determined to follow the path laid out by Orwell in "1984". They already have the camera system. Now comes the Ministry of Truth. The US has its own problems, but they're different ones.
scottmf 9y ago
I live in London and am looking for anyone in the UK willing to take part in demonstrations (real and virtual) against these plans (and the UK gov's hostility towards the internet in general). I've set up a quick a Facebook page[1] to organize things. Send me a message through there and I'll respond soon. Thanks! [1] https://www.facebook.com/Protest-against-Theresa-Mays-plan-to-control-the-Internet-274730522936119/ https://www.facebook.com/Protest-against-Theresa-Mays-plan-t...
- nebabyte 9y ago
  Bear in mind the concerns pointed out in this [0] subthread, namely that parents/citizens might not know (or want to bother learning) enough about "how the internet works" (or even thinking "having the government handle protecting our children" is their preference) - my suggestion would be to come up with analogous restrictions of the freedoms they DO hold dear, and possible alternatives (e.g. content stratification) that allows them that complacent hands-off worry-free approach without having to compromise net freedoms. Best of luck. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14374533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14374533
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    Stop explaining things and go straight for the emotional language. It's good to have explanations available but if you lead off with them people stop listening because it's boring. This is something right-wingers understand very well and left-wingers need to learn.
- chriswarbo 9y ago
  I'm too far from London to take part in a physical demonstration, but I'd suggest having a secondary resource to point people to which doesn't use Facebook (or Twitter, G+, etc.). Your target demographic are more likely to avoid/block those services (like I do).
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    Unless you're in the most remote part of Scotland London is only a train ride away from anywhere in the UK. If your freedom isn't worth the price of a train ticket...
gragas 9y ago
It's actually disgusting to me the people like Theresa May can come to these conclusions and think "this seems like a good idea"
moystard 9y ago
It's crazy how much this country has changed since I moved in the UK in 2010. I originally moved here because London was a city encouraging tolerance, freedom and respect for each other. Technology wise, this city was also the heart of Europe with a great pool of companies and engineers to achieve big things and counterbalance the hegemony of the Silicon Valley and the US. Every new proposal these days from the UK government is pushing an authoritarian government, and the Brexit has given them an excuse for more populism and isolationism. As a French man, I moved here because of all these reasons. I had a job in France, a good situation, but I wanted to discover, meet new people, enlarge my horizon. Today, I am not sure that London and the UK are the right places for that.
- aquadrop 9y ago
  Yes, looks like terrorists are winning... They made everyone's life to be worse, that was basically their goal. In the name of fight against terrorism power-hungry politicians propose mind-boggling useless and awful measures, and people don't stop them, because "how can you be against fight on terrorism?" So sad.
  - userbinator 9y ago
    and people don't stop them, because "how can you be against fight on terrorism?" I would bet that if they tried, they might be considered terrorists too. It reminds me of this old Thomas Jefferson quote: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
  - zabana 9y ago
    Terrorism is probably the best ally western governments have found to advance their authoritarian agenda. The sad thing is people are actually falling for it. You just have to look at the way the UK Government complained that they didn't have a backdoor to whatsapp's infrastructure because the "terrorist" was able to plan his attack using their service. What is it going to be next ? "London Horrified after Uber Driver blows up his car in Leicester Square. Theresa May to force Uber to share user's personal data with the government". I hate to sound Alex Jones-y but you've got to admit that there's a pattern here.
wnevets 9y ago
Is anyone really surprised that pro-brexit politicians would want something like this?
kyriakos 9y ago
Its like these are the first steps before V for Vendetta's plot...
- yborg 9y ago
  ENGLAND PREVAILS
  - sctb 9y ago
    Please don't post like this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
moomin 9y ago
If anyone was still under the impression that Brexit was going to lead to a more international Britain rather than be carte blanche for every dumb idea a politician has might want to start paying attention.
Spare_account 9y ago
How do these proposals compare with the regulations imposed on print and television media in the UK? Regulations imposed by a well meaning government can presumably be used for good. Hate speech is already banned in the UK, has that been abused by the organisations that enforce those rules? It seems conceivable to me that while tighter regulations on the Internet could be abused by a malicious government, they might not be. The govt might just use the powers to stamp out a bit of extremist material here and there.
- hyperdunc 9y ago
  Any good intentions behind a power grab are largely irrelevant. Just because a government may not seem so bad right now, there's no guarantee things will stay that way. History is littered with examples of rapid-onset tyranny.
tzakrajs 9y ago
Theresa May is very basic and very prude. Colour me unsurprised.
glitcher 9y ago
Terrorists have also been known to hide weapons underneath their clothes. Does this mean it should be law that everyone walk around naked so that terrorists have "no safe place" to hide things underneath their garments?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
douche 9y ago
Good luck. The sun set long ago on Britannia.
mjsweet 9y ago
How about a government controlled and regulated by the intenet?
IsaacL 9y ago
The headline sounds sensationalised. Below are the relevant sections from the Conservative Party Manifesto (https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/manifesto2017/Manifesto2017.pdf https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/manifesto2017/Manifesto20...). "The safest place to be online In harnessing the digital revolution, we must take steps to protect the vulnerable and give people confidence to use the internet without fear of abuse, criminality or exposure to horrific content. Our starting point is that online rules should reflect those that govern our lives offline. It should be as unacceptable to bully online as it is in the playground, as difficult to groom a young child on the internet as it is in a community, as hard for children to access violent and degrading pornography online as it is in the high street, and as difficult to commit a crime digitally as it is physically. Where technology can find a solution, we will pursue it. We will work with industry to introduce new protections for minors, from images of pornography, violence, and other age-inappropriate content not just on social media but in app stores and content sites as well. We will put a responsibility on industry not to direct users – even unintentionally – to hate speech, pornography, or other sources of harm. We will make clear the responsibility of platforms to enable the reporting of inappropriate, bullying, harmful or illegal content, with take-down on a comply-or-explain basis. We will continue to push the internet companies to deliver on their commitments to develop technical tools to identify and remove terrorist propaganda, to help smaller companies build their capabilities and to provide support for civil society organisations to promote alternative and counter-narratives. In addition, we do not believe that there should be a safe space for terrorists to be able to communicate online and will work to prevent them from having this capability. We will educate today’s young people in the harms of the internet and how best to combat them, introducing comprehensive Relationships and Sex Education in all primary and secondary schools to ensure that children learn about the risks of the internet, including cyberbullying and online grooming. Where we believe people need more protections to keep them safe, we will act to protect them. We will give people new rights to ensure they are in control of their own data, including the ability to require major social media platforms to delete information held about them at the age of 18, the ability to access and export personal data, and an expectation that personal data held should be stored in a secure way. To create a sound ethical framework for how data is used, we will institute an expert Data Use and Ethics Commission to advise regulators and parliament on the nature of data use and how best to prevent its abuse. The Commission will help us to develop the principles and rules that will give people confidence that their data is being handled properly. Alongside this commission, we will bring forward a new data protection law, fit for our new data age, to ensure the very best standards for the safe, flexible and dynamic use of data and enshrining our global leadership in the ethical and proportionate regulation of data. We will put the National Data Guardian for Health and Social Care on a statutory footing to ensure data security standards are properly enforced." ----- I don't know how the data regulations mentioned at the end compare with the EU's Data Protection Directive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive), which is already part of UK law. It's also interesting to compare the comments in this thread with the recent thread about the EU's fines for Facebook (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13219828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13219828), where the EU was praised for protecting consumer rights. I am genuinely undecided on this issue. I'm basically pro-freedom and pro-capitalist in politics, so Theresa's May's anti-market and authoritarian policies have made me much less likely to vote Conservative. Still, I think the right to privacy is an essential part of the right to liberty, so there's some justification for the government regulating the use of personal data.
MarkMMullin 9y ago
This is horrendous - the entire point of the Internet is that it doesn't care, it's an inter-network, and it's only goal is to keep the packets flowing, at least when our dear leaders STFU. As someone in and out of machine learning - here's an example - I can litter the downtown with cameras, feed them into an ML cluster and if a child wanders off, it's mere seconds to find them again. Or, as in the great state of Connecticut, I can be so goddamn deranged that I want to put guns on drones, and believe semi-autonomous is a fine opening position. The problem is no matter how impressive the feat in ML, the systems involved have zero understanding of the outcome as a value judgement and they aren't going to gain one for a very long time. Do not teach machines to kill because they have absolutely no understanding of the difference between a beneficial act and a hostile act, they just reduce the error between where they're at and where you told them to be at. Going back to the internet you do not ever ever do this, because then what you are creating is a global censor. Happily for the moment such efforts are both localized and porous but this gaggle of idiots shrieking about terrorists and pedophiles need to SFTU and learn something, before they hatch something much worse.
- ygaf 9y ago
  Put the drone soapbox away.
  - MarkMMullin 9y ago
    Actually I like drones - my point is that no matter how smart it appears, software's still a pretty simple system doing what you told it to do. With what May wants, she will hatch a world where she can put you anywhere (video + ML to implant you), or hell just post online in your id, she can sign it and make it legal in a lot jurisdictions (because she poked a big fat hole in the crypto we use) and then she can use it as a big club on you - she can also control what you see on the internet, meaning she can easily make sure you see only what she wants you to see - and how long do you think that set of tricks really stays secret with 'her' - my point is it's hard enough to get this right, I think at the end of the day Arthur C. Clarke once again had the essence of it - let the 'smart' machine (I rate the internet as a very smart machine) do it's job, keep that job straightforward, the side effects are potentially horrendous.
djklanac 9y ago
US citizens should contact their representatives to indicate that this is not ok: Facebook.com/townhall If you'd like a bit of boilerplate, here's a message I sent to my senator in Georgia: "Senator Perdue. I came across a troubling proposal by our U.K. allies to censor internet communications. This reminds me of our own net neutrality debate here in the US. What is your stance on regulating the internet? For your reference: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/theresa-may-internet-conservatives-government-a7744176.html" http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new... I'm also open to any constructive comments that could make this message more effective.
- mxschumacher 9y ago
  better to call, emails will generally not get you far
awinter-py 9y ago
> If elected, Theresa May will "take steps to protect the reliability and objectivity of information that is essential to our democracy" > The plans will allow Britain to become "the global leader in the regulation of the use of personal data and the internet", the manifesto claims. > The manifesto also proposes that internet companies will have to pay a levy, like the one currently paid by gambling firms. Just like with gambling, that money will be used to pay for advertising schemes to tell people about the dangers of the internet, in particular being used to "support awareness and preventative activity to counter internet harms", according to the manifesto.
- runeks 9y ago
  Why regulate just the internet? It's just one way to transfer information. Surely, if we want to assure the "reliability and objectivity of information", we must also control publishers, including newspapers and independent journalists. After all, how can government be sure that only correct information spreads unless it has complete control over it?
Banthum 9y ago
This is one reason why I oppose multiculturalism. Incompatible cultures in close proximity inevitably create civil conflict (e.g. terrorism, etc). This gives authorities an excuse to take more and more control over individuals' interactions with the excuse of trying to prevent that conflict. In a culturally-unified Britain, May would have no excuse at all to try this Orwellian crap. See also: Patriot Act. >"The plans are in keeping with the Tories' commitment that the online world must be regulated as strongly as the offline one, and that the same rules should apply in both." I agree! It should be regulated the same way. Since the online world is pure speech, it should barely be regulated at all aside from direct threats and incitement to violence.
- ygaf 9y ago
  That is a profound point although you're only going to get downvoted for the first point. My analogy of the web is that internet websites are street establishments, and at least two parties (ISP / the website owners) have you on CCTV. The website (and your ISP if they analyse traffic) have internal CCTV of your activity, other parties only have footage that you walked into the establishment and spent X time there. But I'm digressing. I should be free to walk into places.
hoschicz 9y ago
The laws would also force technology companies to delete anything that a person posted when they were under 18. What? I can't believe this thinking finds some voters! Don't they see how impossible that is to achieve?
hoschicz 9y ago
The laws would also force technology companies to delete anything that a person posted when they were under 18. What? I can't believe this thinking finds some voters! Don't they see how impossible that is to achieve?
owenversteeg 9y ago
I've noticed something about the UK: it's the most "compliant" country I've been to. This isn't always a bad thing: it means that when the rude person in the movie theater is told off they'll shut up and sit down. But it also means that when the government tells the population "we're going to surveil you and control what you read" the vast majority of people don't raise a fuss. One example of this was when I was photographing some buildings in the UK. I was stopped by a police officer, and knew my UK rights, and he was shocked that I refused to stop photographing the buildings (which I was doing legally.) He eventually conceded, but another time a UK officer did not concede and threatened to arrest me (again, both times were fully within the law.) There's something in the national DNA, I feel. Like I said, being compliant isn't inherently a good thing or a bad thing: but it does mean that stuff like this, which is pretty horrifying, will probably pass. I type this comment less than 100 miles from the UK, but even here in the Netherlands (although our government is occasionally very disrespectful of privacy) people are more likely to raise a fuss and stop something like this. Even in the US, politicians have to be a little bit more careful about their support of egregious surveillance methods: hide it in an agriculture bill, disguise it, publicly denounce the surveillance state, etc etc. But Theresa May literally said "we want to put huge restrictions on what people can post, share, and publish online" - direct quote - and nobody's protesting (except a handful of noble British anti-surveillance organizations fighting a losing battle.)
- schoen 9y ago
  > I was stopped by a police officer, and knew my UK rights, and he was shocked that I refused to stop photographing the buildings (which I was doing legally.) I have the impression that the differences you mention are real. But I often hear that the U.K. is more compliant in this sense than the U.S., yet there are lots of cases of police in the U.S. improperly telling people to stop photographing or recording something (often either buildings, infrastructure, or the police themselves). The police here are also often shocked when people don't comply with these orders, and may threaten to arrest people for noncompliance, even though the law is also almost always on the photographers' side. So I'm not sure your example directly proves your point about differences between countries. But maybe police in the Netherlands, at least, wouldn't usually behave this way. :-)
sgt101 9y ago
Most people - 90%+ didn't have access to a free internet until early 2000's (for practical purposes), encryption was hardly ever used by private citizens until GSM came in in the 80's, and then it was totally back doored - by law and standard. Did we live in a dictatorship? Democracy and a free society seemed to exist then, and before. Perhaps they were healthier in the 1990's than in the last few years?
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- rz2k 9y ago
  Are those serious questions?
  - sgt101 9y ago
    Well - polemical and rhetorical... but I think people forget that there was a time before the internet as we know it now.
pishpash 9y ago
Now let us see how much the Western world truly believes in its own professed creed of openness, or whether its people have merely been cowardly hypocrites taking comfort in the privilege of never having to confront the true diversity of the human world.
Keyframe 9y ago
I quite don't understand what's going on in UK. How is this downward spiral possible in this day and age? In UK of all places.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Among other reasons, because capitalism trains people to be consumers almost from birth and conditions them to be largely passive selectors rather than investing them with agency. This should not be construed as an endorsement of other -isms that also encourage political passivity to authoritarian ends.
- Boothroid 9y ago
  Thankfully we will have control of our borders again soon, and so the spiral can be halted.
  - hyperdunc 9y ago
    That's not going to stop authoritarian elements within the country from screwing with basic freedoms.
libeclipse 9y ago
What the actual fuck. This is legitimately worse than SOPA.
subterfudge4 9y ago
The sad thing about this is that other nations like India will follow suite of their colonial masters.
codecamper 9y ago
Too bad this headline doesn't say "Create a New Government, controlled & regulated by the Internet". Transpose two words & it really reads better.
w3news 9y ago
The Internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/# https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/#
libeclipse 9y ago
If you want to make an impact, consider donating to The Open Rights Group: https://www.openrightsgroup.org/donate/ https://www.openrightsgroup.org/donate/
pmarreck 9y ago
Thanks for making us look good, UK. - united statesians
alando46 9y ago
What a waste of energy.

347 points by jakub_g 9y ago

marcusarmstrong 9y ago

This is terrifying.

wodencafe 9y ago

What could they possibly be thinking? Nobody wants this, except the gov't.

kobeya 9y ago
I believe you answered your own question.

notliketherest 9y ago

This is one of the most overtly authoritarian proposals for internet regulation I've ever heard from a democratic, Western nation. How in the hell are the people of the UK supporting something like this? As an American who cherishes liberty and freedom, I'm shocked that anyone could support these laws in the UK. They are straight up Orwellian...

CiaranMcNulty 9y ago
Whether we are supporting it or not remains to be seen. May has always had this authoritarian streak but rose to the office of Prime Minister without being elected. Sadly this is unlikely to become a key issue in the forthcoming election, so an attempt at implementation is likely and we'll end up 'supporting' it passively by voting for the proposers.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Whether we are supporting it or not remains to be seen. After living quietly with 24/7 cctv monitoring, all kinds of anti-privacy laws, etc, it's not like it's a real nail-biting mystery this one...
jansho 9y ago
We've just become very passive. No one makes a noise about being the most CCTV-ed nation in the world. Even when the leaks about the true nature of GCHQ surveillance came out, there wasn't much rage in the streets. I guess we are all secretly OK with it. "You shouldn't worry, unless you have something to hide."
- spaceribs 9y ago
  I was thinking about this in relation to the pirate radio history of the UK. Maybe people are apathetic because everyone knows no matter how "Nanny State" things get, smart people can skirt their draconian tendencies no matter what? If the more fascist members of society are placated by technical placebos, why not allow them to pretend they are actually in control of the "situation"? I'm personally keeping a close eye on lifi. In the US the FCC restrictions on the range of wifi networks restricts mesh networking substantially. If it's just invisible gigabit light communication from rooftop to rooftop, it could be a huge gamechanger.
  - mattnewton 9y ago
    I don't think this is a real solution. I need to talk to my friends and family privately without installing conspicious hardware on their house. The right to encrypt and the right to privacy too are precedents that need to be defended, otherwise as soon as the law catches up and learns about the loophole, it will be closed quickly.
    - spaceribs 9y ago
      Sorry if I gave you the impression that it was a solution! What I'm saying is that the technical cat is already out of the bag, we're already moving forward with stronger encryption and a multilayered internet. Adding restrictions on the ISP level just creates a market to get around that restriction, be it mesh networks, li-fi, or low earth orbit satellites.
- rogerbinns 9y ago
  Do people in the UK see the police as adversarial, like they do in the US? To me (a perception) it seems like US police are expected to act disproportionately and have the system on their side. See for example advice on never talking to them, profiling, civil asset seizures, swat raids, plea bargains etc. It doesn't seem like UK police are seen the same way or even close. CCTV and internet control are additional tools for them.
coldtea 9y ago
>As an American who cherishes liberty and freedom, I'm shocked that anyone could support these laws in the UK. They are straight up Orwellian... Well, those (liberty and freedom) are mostly cherished in lip service by most, and only when it comes to government. Otherwise, few bat an eye that between them Google and Facebook (and perhaps 2-3 other players) control and have access to 90% of what people do on the internet. And that they also sleep with their government for their nation's interests.
- mattnewton 9y ago
  >Otherwise, few bat an eye that between them Google and Facebook (and perhaps 2-3 other players) Big difference there between the one government that can put you in jail and you cannot divorce without leaving the country (sometimes not even then), and some fragmented web services you can point your browser in a different place. Enormous, meaningful difference worth fighting over.
  - codedokode 9y ago
    What prevents Google and Facebook from sharing data with the government? Especially if nobody would know about it?
    - allover 9y ago
      I can choose not to use/give meaningful data to Google and Facebook, but I don't get to opt out of elected government. I agree with GPP that the 2 aren't really comparable.
      - coldtea 9y ago
        >I can choose not to use/give meaningful data to Google and Facebook Between Google Ads on tons of site, their Google Analytics in tons of sites, your friends sharing stuff, photos etc with you on Facebook, your friends receiving your messages on their Gmail account, and the several other (differently branded) services they own, not to mention sites hosted by them on GAE and such, sites serving you Google Web Fonts, etc, you don't really have much choice... Especially with Google being the only game in town for quality search results.
rorygreen 9y ago
As a person from and living in the UK, I'm equally shocked and appalled as you. Everybody I know is baffled by and vehemently against these ridiculous proposals. Quite frankly I have no idea who is voting for the Conservatives. Anybody with half a brain cell and not pushing an evil agenda seems to despise the Conservative party. (I'm sure there are some reasonable Tory supporters out there, I've never met them though. I also think in this current sociopolitical climate it's plain dangerous to vote for the Conservatives, even if you believe you have good reasons to support them.) As a country, we've lost faith in politics and I fully expect this to be demonstrated by a very low turnout for the general election in June. The issue with this is we currently have no strong enough opposition to the Tories (thanks to an incredibly effective smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour party, led by the media and perpetuated by the Labour MPs themselves) so will end up with an even greater Conservative majority and another 5 years of this dystopian madness. I very much hope I'm proven wrong. I'd be happy to elaborate on some of these points if you're interested; I have a few theories about what is currently going on and what has led us here. It is both very interesting and incredibly upsetting to observe and analyse the state of politics in this country at the moment. Edit: I should state that I am not a Labour party supporter, I was just trying to give a vague overview of the state of our politics at the moment.
- keithpeter 9y ago
  I suspect that most people decide who to vote for based on money, trust on things like jobs, and fear of unemployment &c. I don't think internet policy comes into the decision really for people who don't follow these things and who are not technical. UK: anyone got a good simple page I can point neighbours at about why this should be an election issue?
- mike-cardwell 9y ago
  This issue is deeper than party politics. You can blame the Tories, but the Labour party gave us RIPA. They're just as bad, if not worse. It does not matter which political party is in power at the moment, they all want to increase surveillance. And if they say they don't want to before they get into power, they seem to change their tune for some reason once they're in.
mike-cardwell 9y ago
As an American who cherishes liberty and freedom, your relationships, conversations, location and political opinions are tracked, logged, and available to your government.
AJ007 9y ago
We can't forget that the whole purpose of the internet is decentralization. Perhaps if authoritarian regimes are able to regulate it, that is a sign things have become too centralized. The more chilling question is why is a Western democracy trying to copy the frameworks of China, the UAE, and other crumbling regimes? This feels like a shadow of the Cold War where certain people believed that the US would fail because capitalism was weaker than communism (parallels abound.)
- Lordarminius 9y ago
  I agree with all your points except to point out that CCCP is not a "crumbling regime" and a little reflection would indicate why we should not even wish it to be one.
Silhouette 9y ago
How in the hell are the people of the UK supporting something like this? Firstly, a lot of people know little if anything about what's going on. They're quite understandably more concerned about high profile issues like Brexit and the collapsing NHS and trains that don't run so they can't get to work and the cost of their kid going to university. The mainstream media is also more concerned with those things. Secondly, even those who do have some idea of what's going on overall support authoritarian measures if those measures are presented as providing necessary tools to the police and security services to combat serious crime and terrorism, and of course they always are presented that way. When normal people are asked about the actual measures in the laws, for example about all the different government organisations that now have powers to access surveillance data and all the different purposes they can use it for, a lot of people do have significant reservations or even object strongly. But we still tend to trust our government organisations to basically do the right thing in this country, for better or worse, and so supporting the police and security services with new powers is a vote-winner.
snowwolf 9y ago
Normally the conservatives would never be able to push this authoritarian agenda so openly, but a unique set of circumstances has given them the opening to push through some of their most extreme objectives. The Conservatives are the only mainstream party promising to follow through with Brexit, and Labour have disintegrated under the 'leadership' of Jeremy Corbyn. This means that many traditional Labour voters are willing to vote Conservative to ensure they get their Brexit, regardless of whatever else the Tories are putting forwards in their manifesto. They've can basically put whatever they want in their manifesto and people will still vote for them to ensure Brexit happens - that's how determined the Leave voters are. Current polls (although we know how reliable those are) suggest the Tories will take over 400 seats at the general election, giving them absolute control of the government with no other party able to oppose them.
- vidarh 9y ago
  As much as things are looking bad, saying Labour has disintegrated under Corbyn is a truth with severe modifications. Labour is currently polling higher than Ed Milliband was, and has been steadily improving. The biggest problem now is not that Labour has disintegrated, though the infighting certainly have not made things easy, but that UKIP and the Lib Dems have been disintegrating, and UKIP voters in particular appears to be largely going Tory. Labour might lose a lot of seats based on current polling, but that is more down to a blatantly undemocratic electoral system than to how the party is polling.
  - ed_blackburn 9y ago
    The Conservatives have stolen UKIPs voters by swinging them to the right. They've been able to do this with impunity, in part because of the Labour Leadership, whilst supported on a level I've never seen before in terms of passion, it is frankly not universally popular enough. The only metric you can measure against is how many seats a party wins by. Will Corbyn build on Milliband, or fair worse? I speak to some hardcore Corbyn supports and their passion is incredible, but alas, only one person get a vote and for all someone passion a pensioner will vote Conservative out of habit and inertia.
IanDrake 9y ago
"Are you on the side of the terrorists and child pornographers?" That is how resistance will be framed and it could play just as well here, but I hope I'm wrong.
hollander 9y ago
Maybe it's the cue to vote for the other party, which will mean the end of Brexit?

Maken 9y ago

While I can understand some of the arguments in favour of regulating internet content, it amazes me people are still talking about pornography like some ancient demon from which our children must be protected at all costs. Does anybody still buy that rhetoric in this day and age?

Maken 9y ago
Also, wasn't one of the reasons behind the Brexit that the European courts were blocking this kind of legislation?
- foldr 9y ago
  No? I don't think anyone mentioned regulations on pornography during the campaign.
  - Maken 9y ago
    I don't know if it was explicitly part of the campaign, but UK's government was one of the biggest blockers on European Union's net neutrality laws. Also, the conservatives mentioned the interference of the European Court of Human Rights and its ability to override sentences inside of the UK as one of the reasons they wanted to leave the EU.
mamon 9y ago
[...]pornography like some ancient demon[...] Given the amount of psychological damage inflicted by pornography that comparison seems pretty accurate.
- smsm42 9y ago
  You mean like both are imaginary entities which have real-life consequences only if you believe highly questionable accounts of people who stand to profit a lot if you do believe them, but still offer no objective proof?
- blackguardx 9y ago

mcphage 9y ago

Step 1. Make a new, secure internet so that terrorists can't operate secretly. Step 2. Make terrorists use that internet. Hmm... I'm detecting a problem with this plan...

hxegon 9y ago
Nah bruh it'll work just give me authority over your online rights
- mcphage 9y ago
  Later: Well, that didn't work.

thegeomaster 9y ago

This reads like an April Fool's prank. They say that people should be protected from "harmful content", which somehow includes pornography? Is it the 80s again? The rhetoric here sounds like it's coming from the distant past, when government officials were completely out of touch with the way ordinary people use new technology. Now it just looks like a blatant attempt to score "anti-terrorism" points and regulate the shit out of an industry in draconian ways, just for the sake of regulating it (what are the possible motives, besides the laughable "we don't want to provide safe space for terrorists to communicate" claim?) Are people actually supporting this kind of thinking?

kobeya 9y ago
I suspect harmful content here also include ISIS recruiting.
noir_lord 9y ago
> The rhetoric here sounds like it's coming from the distant past. May was an authoritarian home secretary who was raised (and is a practising) Christian (iirc her dad was a vicar). She's a one-woman Morality Police (in her head at least).
- Doctor_Fegg 9y ago
  Ironically her father's former home church is now signed up to the Inclusive Church movement, a progressive, tolerant movement which is the opposite of her xenophobic conservatism. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_Church https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusive_Church
jaclaz 9y ago
Maybe you meant the 70's? The '80's were pretty much liberal AFAICR (in the rest of Europe), the UK has always had some "special rules", guess which country is yellow among all the green in this map? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_by_region https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_by_region From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_the_United_King... >The UK has a markedly different tradition of pornography regulation from that found in most other Western countries, which legalised hardcore pornography during the 1960s and 1970s. By contrast the UK was almost the only liberal democracy not to do so.

oneplane 9y ago

This will neither work nor result in the expected results. The lines stating that online would be governed the same way as offline life, and access to 'bad' materials would be 'just as hard' shows how disconnected from reality that idea is. Access to violence, hate, porn etc. isn't "harder" offline, and bullying on playgrounds isn't actually getting "fixed" at the moment, just it it won't be online. The whole irony is that if the online rules would be implemented and resulting in the same things as offline life, the internet would pretty much remain as-is. Of course, the law and the rules would be allowing for more legal spying and detaining, as well as controlling official narrative, which would have nothing to do with online or offline life and is a whole new thing added on top of the current policy. I hope that if we can just hold off on the crazy orwellian plans and ideas long enough for the old cluster of people in high places to die (of old age), we might actually be able to get the good stuff we created online to actually start fixing the offline problems in governing. That will never happen with the old style people in place, and only time will fix that, since they won't go freely as power is addictive and corrupting (as always).

goodplay 9y ago
> (of old age) I find the need to add this qualifier sad. Normally, any rational adult (children even) would be able to correctly infer your intent from the context, but given how things are these days and the crazy laws being passed, I certainly don't blame you for feeling the need to be specific. See the particularly sad "Special note to law-enforcement agents" on https://sphincs.cr.yp.to/ https://sphincs.cr.yp.to/ . I can't help but feel that things are taking a turn for the worse.
coldtea 9y ago
>I hope that if we can just hold off on the crazy orwellian plans and ideas long enough for the old cluster of people in high places to die (of old age) The phenomenon has nothing much to do with "age". The old people running stuff today said the same thing for the "old timers" (Nixon etc) when they were young, and lots of them were themselves were 60s hippies, rebels, revolutionaries, etc when they were young. See how they turned out? It's not that new generations bring more liberal people, and not even that age changes you. It's power and interests that come into play. Which young persons don't have much, in the same way they don't have a seat in the senate. And when (a few) do, they can be as conservative/exploitive/etc as any 80 year old politician or CEO, etc.

sscarduzio 9y ago

Makes me giggle when people try to enforce policies about the internet without knowing anything about internet.

kobeya 9y ago
...like all the countries in the world that do maintain such border filters?
gaius 9y ago
Makes me giggle when people think "the Internet" can do a damn thing about people with direct physical access to the submarine cables who buy servers and storage by the acre...

mschuster91 9y ago

As much as I'd like to say "hey Brits, come on and move to Germany as long as you still can", our own government is going way down the authoritarian route, too. Not that extreme as in the UK, yes, but still - our secret services and the police got awarded the right to automatically access our ID card photography. What this means is that e.g. at demonstrations they can pull up a camera van and have everyone identified in real time - as any form of masking is forbidden by law since the RAF days. When you're on social support, government may access your entire bank account data including transactions, at will and use everything they find to make your life even more miserable than it already is. When you're a refugee, immigration offices are now allowed and equipped to forensically examine your cell phone to determine "if you tell the truth", plus you have your fingerprints and biometric photos taken. First they came for the jobless, then the refugees, ... the path which many countries these days are going is a very dark one and I am not sure if democratic processes will allow a push back or if it will need massive civil unrest.

MichaelGG 9y ago
>When you're a refugee, immigration offices are now allowed and equipped to forensically examine your cell phone to determine "if you tell the truth", plus you have your fingerprints and biometric photos taken. ... What's wrong with inspecting their stories and taking biometrics? Just believing people that are obviously in their 20s claiming to be teens is one reason people are becoming anti immigration. Just cause someone shows up in the EU cause their country sucks doesn't mean they should just be let in without any scrutiny. ProTip: Most people in such countries would prefer to live in the EU/Canada/US. Blindly believing and letting in anyone damages efforts to admit people who actually are at risk. Coming in as a refugee is declaring your country of origin has totally failed and you're availing of the mercy of others, of which you might never be able to repay. Getting scanned to make sure you're not gaming the system seems like a trivial price to pay.
- mschuster91 9y ago
  > ... What's wrong with inspecting their stories and taking biometrics? "inspecting their stories" in this case is violating their human right to privacy. Taking biometric photos is fine if used only (!) for checking of multiple applications, but not to submit them to the police databases - as this puts refugees under a general suspicion of being future criminals. > Getting scanned to make sure you're not gaming the system seems like a trivial price to pay. The issue is: it's easy to break the dam in regard to human rights for refugees following your line of thought. When measures like this are enacted for refugees, usually no one cares until politicians say "we already have this for refugees/homeless/jobless/other bottom group, so why not extend it to soccer fans/left wing people/the general population". And by the time the "expansion racket" has arrived at "the general population" there is no more real resistance. This is why weakening of human rights is something that should result in jailtime for the politicians involved.

lossolo 9y ago

It's funny when people that do not have any idea about technology wants to regulate Internet. Someone can just use application developed in other country, what they will do ? block the site on ISP level? People will link to thousands other sites that will have binaries of this application on facebook/twitter/any other site. They can't even handle piracy and they think that they can control whole Internet? When I hear that kind of proposals I always have this picture in my mind: https://torrentfreak.com/images/blocktpb1.jpg https://torrentfreak.com/images/blocktpb1.jpg

wyck 9y ago
The technology exists to firewall entire countries, afterall the ISP's connect to the larger "pipes", this has already happened in several countries. Sure you could probably tunnel a connection but the average person certainly can't, this fractures the internet.

adamnemecek 9y ago

I've always thought that Theresa May should have more of a say in what I do online. Who else than Theresa would know what's best for me.

m0nty 9y ago
Paul Dacre?
- noir_lord 9y ago
  Is there a difference? Ones the monkey the other the organ grinder, I leave it to you to decide which is which.

paradite 9y ago

Yesterday's discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14374533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14374533

kobeya 9y ago

I'm thankful Hong Kong is now part of China so they can keep their fair and open Internet. What a weird world we live in.

solotronics 9y ago
internet in HK is different from mainland China internet
- hedora 9y ago
  Moving forward, would it still be that different from mainland China if HK were part of the UK?
- kobeya 9y ago
  Yes... my comment wouldn't make much sense if that wasn't the case.

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azinman2 9y ago

I know this is the independent, but is this for real? It sounds like a prank, straight out of the movie Brazil especially with the whole terrorist motivation. And in the U.K.?!

SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
The headline claims that Theresa May "wants to create a new internet" but there's nothing in the story to actually back up that claim. A "new internet" would involve new infrastructure, ISPs, DNS servers, hosting companies etc. which seems pretty far fetched. Of course, that doesn't detract from the (potentially very scary) reality of the situation.

microcolonel 9y ago

This is the problem with letting Labour be held hostage by one out-of-touch lunatic. You get an election where the Conservatives hold all of the cards, and can do basically anything they please as long as Jeremy Corbyn is the opposition. Labour is so out of touch that even this draconian, insane law will probably not stop people from voting Conservative this time around. Labour has allowed itself to be infiltrated by antisemites and radical socialists, and nobody in Britain is voting for that.

SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
It's like our own version of the "nobody likes Hillary so I guess we'll vote Trump" situation. Difference here being that most of the media is anti-Corbyn which will tip the balance even further.
ygaf 9y ago
We've got the Lib Dems; no matter how ineffectual a Lib Dem vote ostensibly is, you're not having to choose one of the other two.

DrNuke 9y ago

Can't see the scandal, we are being eaten alive daily by big corps for profit and surrendering them our entire national and supranational infrstructures, so govs should really try and get control back. Do you really think Zuckerberg, Brin, Bezos, Microsoft and Cook are better than May & co.? That said, the other extreme is North Korea, so we know what to expect, eventually.

ryanx435 9y ago
each of those companies/CEO's you listed control a subset of sites on the internet. May wants to control the entirety of sites on the internet. if you can't see the difference, than I don't know what to say to you.

msmm 9y ago

As a someone who lived in abusive relationship with a control freak this manifesto scares me.

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iamben 9y ago

I'd be curious to see what would happen if Mindgeek (owners of pornhub, etc) put a banner at the top of their websites for British visitors saying "your access to pornography is under threat" or similar. I wonder what effect they would/could have on British voters, based on the sheer amount of traffic they get (and the fact that a considerable amount of people enjoy how easy it is to look at porn, whether they admit it or not).

noir_lord 9y ago
That's actually a really good idea, it'd also be in there interest to do so since the UK makes up a good chunk of their users. We do like our porn.

Animats 9y ago

The UK leadership seems determined to follow the path laid out by Orwell in "1984". They already have the camera system. Now comes the Ministry of Truth. The US has its own problems, but they're different ones.

scottmf 9y ago

I live in London and am looking for anyone in the UK willing to take part in demonstrations (real and virtual) against these plans (and the UK gov's hostility towards the internet in general). I've set up a quick a Facebook page[1] to organize things. Send me a message through there and I'll respond soon. Thanks! [1] https://www.facebook.com/Protest-against-Theresa-Mays-plan-to-control-the-Internet-274730522936119/ https://www.facebook.com/Protest-against-Theresa-Mays-plan-t...

nebabyte 9y ago
Bear in mind the concerns pointed out in this [0] subthread, namely that parents/citizens might not know (or want to bother learning) enough about "how the internet works" (or even thinking "having the government handle protecting our children" is their preference) - my suggestion would be to come up with analogous restrictions of the freedoms they DO hold dear, and possible alternatives (e.g. content stratification) that allows them that complacent hands-off worry-free approach without having to compromise net freedoms. Best of luck. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14374533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14374533
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Stop explaining things and go straight for the emotional language. It's good to have explanations available but if you lead off with them people stop listening because it's boring. This is something right-wingers understand very well and left-wingers need to learn.
chriswarbo 9y ago
I'm too far from London to take part in a physical demonstration, but I'd suggest having a secondary resource to point people to which doesn't use Facebook (or Twitter, G+, etc.). Your target demographic are more likely to avoid/block those services (like I do).
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Unless you're in the most remote part of Scotland London is only a train ride away from anywhere in the UK. If your freedom isn't worth the price of a train ticket...

gragas 9y ago

It's actually disgusting to me the people like Theresa May can come to these conclusions and think "this seems like a good idea"

moystard 9y ago

It's crazy how much this country has changed since I moved in the UK in 2010. I originally moved here because London was a city encouraging tolerance, freedom and respect for each other. Technology wise, this city was also the heart of Europe with a great pool of companies and engineers to achieve big things and counterbalance the hegemony of the Silicon Valley and the US. Every new proposal these days from the UK government is pushing an authoritarian government, and the Brexit has given them an excuse for more populism and isolationism. As a French man, I moved here because of all these reasons. I had a job in France, a good situation, but I wanted to discover, meet new people, enlarge my horizon. Today, I am not sure that London and the UK are the right places for that.

aquadrop 9y ago
Yes, looks like terrorists are winning... They made everyone's life to be worse, that was basically their goal. In the name of fight against terrorism power-hungry politicians propose mind-boggling useless and awful measures, and people don't stop them, because "how can you be against fight on terrorism?" So sad.
- userbinator 9y ago
  and people don't stop them, because "how can you be against fight on terrorism?" I would bet that if they tried, they might be considered terrorists too. It reminds me of this old Thomas Jefferson quote: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
- zabana 9y ago
  Terrorism is probably the best ally western governments have found to advance their authoritarian agenda. The sad thing is people are actually falling for it. You just have to look at the way the UK Government complained that they didn't have a backdoor to whatsapp's infrastructure because the "terrorist" was able to plan his attack using their service. What is it going to be next ? "London Horrified after Uber Driver blows up his car in Leicester Square. Theresa May to force Uber to share user's personal data with the government". I hate to sound Alex Jones-y but you've got to admit that there's a pattern here.

wnevets 9y ago

Is anyone really surprised that pro-brexit politicians would want something like this?

kyriakos 9y ago

Its like these are the first steps before V for Vendetta's plot...

yborg 9y ago
ENGLAND PREVAILS
- sctb 9y ago
  Please don't post like this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

moomin 9y ago

If anyone was still under the impression that Brexit was going to lead to a more international Britain rather than be carte blanche for every dumb idea a politician has might want to start paying attention.

Spare_account 9y ago

How do these proposals compare with the regulations imposed on print and television media in the UK? Regulations imposed by a well meaning government can presumably be used for good. Hate speech is already banned in the UK, has that been abused by the organisations that enforce those rules? It seems conceivable to me that while tighter regulations on the Internet could be abused by a malicious government, they might not be. The govt might just use the powers to stamp out a bit of extremist material here and there.

hyperdunc 9y ago
Any good intentions behind a power grab are largely irrelevant. Just because a government may not seem so bad right now, there's no guarantee things will stay that way. History is littered with examples of rapid-onset tyranny.

tzakrajs 9y ago

Theresa May is very basic and very prude. Colour me unsurprised.

glitcher 9y ago

Terrorists have also been known to hide weapons underneath their clothes. Does this mean it should be law that everyone walk around naked so that terrorists have "no safe place" to hide things underneath their garments?

deleted 9y ago
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douche 9y ago

Good luck. The sun set long ago on Britannia.

mjsweet 9y ago

How about a government controlled and regulated by the intenet?

IsaacL 9y ago

The headline sounds sensationalised. Below are the relevant sections from the Conservative Party Manifesto (https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/manifesto2017/Manifesto2017.pdf https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/manifesto2017/Manifesto20...). "The safest place to be online In harnessing the digital revolution, we must take steps to protect the vulnerable and give people confidence to use the internet without fear of abuse, criminality or exposure to horrific content. Our starting point is that online rules should reflect those that govern our lives offline. It should be as unacceptable to bully online as it is in the playground, as difficult to groom a young child on the internet as it is in a community, as hard for children to access violent and degrading pornography online as it is in the high street, and as difficult to commit a crime digitally as it is physically. Where technology can find a solution, we will pursue it. We will work with industry to introduce new protections for minors, from images of pornography, violence, and other age-inappropriate content not just on social media but in app stores and content sites as well. We will put a responsibility on industry not to direct users – even unintentionally – to hate speech, pornography, or other sources of harm. We will make clear the responsibility of platforms to enable the reporting of inappropriate, bullying, harmful or illegal content, with take-down on a comply-or-explain basis. We will continue to push the internet companies to deliver on their commitments to develop technical tools to identify and remove terrorist propaganda, to help smaller companies build their capabilities and to provide support for civil society organisations to promote alternative and counter-narratives. In addition, we do not believe that there should be a safe space for terrorists to be able to communicate online and will work to prevent them from having this capability. We will educate today’s young people in the harms of the internet and how best to combat them, introducing comprehensive Relationships and Sex Education in all primary and secondary schools to ensure that children learn about the risks of the internet, including cyberbullying and online grooming. Where we believe people need more protections to keep them safe, we will act to protect them. We will give people new rights to ensure they are in control of their own data, including the ability to require major social media platforms to delete information held about them at the age of 18, the ability to access and export personal data, and an expectation that personal data held should be stored in a secure way. To create a sound ethical framework for how data is used, we will institute an expert Data Use and Ethics Commission to advise regulators and parliament on the nature of data use and how best to prevent its abuse. The Commission will help us to develop the principles and rules that will give people confidence that their data is being handled properly. Alongside this commission, we will bring forward a new data protection law, fit for our new data age, to ensure the very best standards for the safe, flexible and dynamic use of data and enshrining our global leadership in the ethical and proportionate regulation of data. We will put the National Data Guardian for Health and Social Care on a statutory footing to ensure data security standards are properly enforced." ----- I don't know how the data regulations mentioned at the end compare with the EU's Data Protection Directive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive), which is already part of UK law. It's also interesting to compare the comments in this thread with the recent thread about the EU's fines for Facebook (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13219828 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13219828), where the EU was praised for protecting consumer rights. I am genuinely undecided on this issue. I'm basically pro-freedom and pro-capitalist in politics, so Theresa's May's anti-market and authoritarian policies have made me much less likely to vote Conservative. Still, I think the right to privacy is an essential part of the right to liberty, so there's some justification for the government regulating the use of personal data.

MarkMMullin 9y ago

This is horrendous - the entire point of the Internet is that it doesn't care, it's an inter-network, and it's only goal is to keep the packets flowing, at least when our dear leaders STFU. As someone in and out of machine learning - here's an example - I can litter the downtown with cameras, feed them into an ML cluster and if a child wanders off, it's mere seconds to find them again. Or, as in the great state of Connecticut, I can be so goddamn deranged that I want to put guns on drones, and believe semi-autonomous is a fine opening position. The problem is no matter how impressive the feat in ML, the systems involved have zero understanding of the outcome as a value judgement and they aren't going to gain one for a very long time. Do not teach machines to kill because they have absolutely no understanding of the difference between a beneficial act and a hostile act, they just reduce the error between where they're at and where you told them to be at. Going back to the internet you do not ever ever do this, because then what you are creating is a global censor. Happily for the moment such efforts are both localized and porous but this gaggle of idiots shrieking about terrorists and pedophiles need to SFTU and learn something, before they hatch something much worse.

ygaf 9y ago
Put the drone soapbox away.
- MarkMMullin 9y ago
  Actually I like drones - my point is that no matter how smart it appears, software's still a pretty simple system doing what you told it to do. With what May wants, she will hatch a world where she can put you anywhere (video + ML to implant you), or hell just post online in your id, she can sign it and make it legal in a lot jurisdictions (because she poked a big fat hole in the crypto we use) and then she can use it as a big club on you - she can also control what you see on the internet, meaning she can easily make sure you see only what she wants you to see - and how long do you think that set of tricks really stays secret with 'her' - my point is it's hard enough to get this right, I think at the end of the day Arthur C. Clarke once again had the essence of it - let the 'smart' machine (I rate the internet as a very smart machine) do it's job, keep that job straightforward, the side effects are potentially horrendous.

djklanac 9y ago

US citizens should contact their representatives to indicate that this is not ok: Facebook.com/townhall If you'd like a bit of boilerplate, here's a message I sent to my senator in Georgia: "Senator Perdue. I came across a troubling proposal by our U.K. allies to censor internet communications. This reminds me of our own net neutrality debate here in the US. What is your stance on regulating the internet? For your reference: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/theresa-may-internet-conservatives-government-a7744176.html" http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new... I'm also open to any constructive comments that could make this message more effective.

mxschumacher 9y ago
better to call, emails will generally not get you far

awinter-py 9y ago

> If elected, Theresa May will "take steps to protect the reliability and objectivity of information that is essential to our democracy" > The plans will allow Britain to become "the global leader in the regulation of the use of personal data and the internet", the manifesto claims. > The manifesto also proposes that internet companies will have to pay a levy, like the one currently paid by gambling firms. Just like with gambling, that money will be used to pay for advertising schemes to tell people about the dangers of the internet, in particular being used to "support awareness and preventative activity to counter internet harms", according to the manifesto.

runeks 9y ago
Why regulate just the internet? It's just one way to transfer information. Surely, if we want to assure the "reliability and objectivity of information", we must also control publishers, including newspapers and independent journalists. After all, how can government be sure that only correct information spreads unless it has complete control over it?

Banthum 9y ago

This is one reason why I oppose multiculturalism. Incompatible cultures in close proximity inevitably create civil conflict (e.g. terrorism, etc). This gives authorities an excuse to take more and more control over individuals' interactions with the excuse of trying to prevent that conflict. In a culturally-unified Britain, May would have no excuse at all to try this Orwellian crap. See also: Patriot Act. >"The plans are in keeping with the Tories' commitment that the online world must be regulated as strongly as the offline one, and that the same rules should apply in both." I agree! It should be regulated the same way. Since the online world is pure speech, it should barely be regulated at all aside from direct threats and incitement to violence.

ygaf 9y ago
That is a profound point although you're only going to get downvoted for the first point. My analogy of the web is that internet websites are street establishments, and at least two parties (ISP / the website owners) have you on CCTV. The website (and your ISP if they analyse traffic) have internal CCTV of your activity, other parties only have footage that you walked into the establishment and spent X time there. But I'm digressing. I should be free to walk into places.

hoschicz 9y ago

The laws would also force technology companies to delete anything that a person posted when they were under 18. What? I can't believe this thinking finds some voters! Don't they see how impossible that is to achieve?

hoschicz 9y ago

owenversteeg 9y ago

I've noticed something about the UK: it's the most "compliant" country I've been to. This isn't always a bad thing: it means that when the rude person in the movie theater is told off they'll shut up and sit down. But it also means that when the government tells the population "we're going to surveil you and control what you read" the vast majority of people don't raise a fuss. One example of this was when I was photographing some buildings in the UK. I was stopped by a police officer, and knew my UK rights, and he was shocked that I refused to stop photographing the buildings (which I was doing legally.) He eventually conceded, but another time a UK officer did not concede and threatened to arrest me (again, both times were fully within the law.) There's something in the national DNA, I feel. Like I said, being compliant isn't inherently a good thing or a bad thing: but it does mean that stuff like this, which is pretty horrifying, will probably pass. I type this comment less than 100 miles from the UK, but even here in the Netherlands (although our government is occasionally very disrespectful of privacy) people are more likely to raise a fuss and stop something like this. Even in the US, politicians have to be a little bit more careful about their support of egregious surveillance methods: hide it in an agriculture bill, disguise it, publicly denounce the surveillance state, etc etc. But Theresa May literally said "we want to put huge restrictions on what people can post, share, and publish online" - direct quote - and nobody's protesting (except a handful of noble British anti-surveillance organizations fighting a losing battle.)

schoen 9y ago
> I was stopped by a police officer, and knew my UK rights, and he was shocked that I refused to stop photographing the buildings (which I was doing legally.) I have the impression that the differences you mention are real. But I often hear that the U.K. is more compliant in this sense than the U.S., yet there are lots of cases of police in the U.S. improperly telling people to stop photographing or recording something (often either buildings, infrastructure, or the police themselves). The police here are also often shocked when people don't comply with these orders, and may threaten to arrest people for noncompliance, even though the law is also almost always on the photographers' side. So I'm not sure your example directly proves your point about differences between countries. But maybe police in the Netherlands, at least, wouldn't usually behave this way. :-)

sgt101 9y ago

Most people - 90%+ didn't have access to a free internet until early 2000's (for practical purposes), encryption was hardly ever used by private citizens until GSM came in in the 80's, and then it was totally back doored - by law and standard. Did we live in a dictatorship? Democracy and a free society seemed to exist then, and before. Perhaps they were healthier in the 1990's than in the last few years?

deleted 9y ago
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rz2k 9y ago
Are those serious questions?
- sgt101 9y ago
  Well - polemical and rhetorical... but I think people forget that there was a time before the internet as we know it now.

pishpash 9y ago

Now let us see how much the Western world truly believes in its own professed creed of openness, or whether its people have merely been cowardly hypocrites taking comfort in the privilege of never having to confront the true diversity of the human world.

Keyframe 9y ago

I quite don't understand what's going on in UK. How is this downward spiral possible in this day and age? In UK of all places.

anigbrowl 9y ago
Among other reasons, because capitalism trains people to be consumers almost from birth and conditions them to be largely passive selectors rather than investing them with agency. This should not be construed as an endorsement of other -isms that also encourage political passivity to authoritarian ends.
Boothroid 9y ago
Thankfully we will have control of our borders again soon, and so the spiral can be halted.
- hyperdunc 9y ago
  That's not going to stop authoritarian elements within the country from screwing with basic freedoms.

libeclipse 9y ago

What the actual fuck. This is legitimately worse than SOPA.

subterfudge4 9y ago

The sad thing about this is that other nations like India will follow suite of their colonial masters.

codecamper 9y ago

Too bad this headline doesn't say "Create a New Government, controlled & regulated by the Internet". Transpose two words & it really reads better.

w3news 9y ago

The Internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/# https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/#

libeclipse 9y ago

If you want to make an impact, consider donating to The Open Rights Group: https://www.openrightsgroup.org/donate/ https://www.openrightsgroup.org/donate/

pmarreck 9y ago

Thanks for making us look good, UK. - united statesians

alando46 9y ago

What a waste of energy.