You would be comfortable with YouTube's alternative hosted in Russia connected to the web by a likely mob influenced ISP? Laws the United States makes have a m

You would be comfortable with YouTube's alternative hosted in Russia connected to the web by a likely mob influenced ISP? Laws the United States makes have a more wide reaching affect that you seem to realise. Your outlook of online freedom is quite optimistic. Smaller countries follow the lead of larger ones and for profit corporations generally do their best to follow (or write) the laws of the United States. What happens here influences the behaviour of many. After all, no CEO wants to be arrested on a layover in the United States because their company happened to break a US (this has happened.) The reality is that organisations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been fighting hard against our own government, the United States, since the early 1990s to keep the internet as free as possible. Had no one decided to take up that fight your internet would be under control of such gems as 1998's COPA, along with who knows what garbage the RIAA and MPAA would dream up. The rising influence of authoritarian states such as China dim the prospect of an open and free world generations to come. While they may flaunt intellectual property law today, make no mistake when it is their own intellectual property being infringed upon they will happily add infringement to one of their 68 crimes punishable by death. Make no mistake, what happens today will have a decisive impact on how free the world is 50 or 100 years from now. Nominating Donald Verrilli Jr as the Solicitor General of the United States sends a clear message that the Obama administration seeks the same expertise in chilling internet freedoms as the RIAA and Viacom did when they hired him.