Move over, Australia: France taking 'Net censorship lead
Under Sarkozy, France is moving to a more proactive enforcement model that removes or blocks content at the source, rather than being content to go after lawbreakers. As a consequence, however, France will now have one of the toughest censorship regimes of any robust democracy in the Western hemisphere—though Australia is giving France a good run for its money on the worldwide stage.
Journalists in neighboring countries have been quick to pounce. Germany's Der Spiegel wondered if France was becoming the "Big Brother of Europe" and notes that LOPPSI2 will give "the state unprecedented control over the Internet." The paper also suggests that the government is pushing the law because elections are coming up soon, and Sarkozy hopes that "fear of criminals will convince voters to come to the polling booths."
In the UK, feisty tech publication The Register also plays the Orwell card, saying that France "leapfrogs past Australia in Big Brother stakes" and that it's "becoming the first western country to make even Australia look liberal when it comes to state powers of Internet censorship." (The UK has a non-mandatory child porn block list run by the Internet Watch Foundation.)
As for France, plenty of heated opposition can be found there as well. Jérémie Zimmermann of Internet rights group La Quadrature du Net said last week, "Protection of childhood is shamelessly exploited by Nicolas Sarkozy to implement a measure that will lead to collateral censorship and very dangerous drifts. After the HADOPI comes the LOPPSI: the securitarian machinery of the government is being deployed in an attempt to control the Internet at the expense of freedoms."
Censorship... it's not just for authoritarian states anymore. Such issues are increasingly part of the discourse in democracies, including Indonesia, the most populous Muslim-majority democracy. The government there is working up Internet censorship rules to crack down on sites that offend "public decency," including pornography (child and otherwise).
