Quote:
EU officials denied that it would be impossible to track down websites based in remote places, insisting that the local provider based in the EU could be held to account. One said: “You always need a provider here that gives you access to websites. They can decide technically which websites to allow. Otherwise how would China block internet sites? There are no technological obstacles, only legal ones.”
I'm not sure whether I find it amusing or rage inducing that the EU is now taking technical advice from the Chinese censors: but I certainly find it no surprise that this federast is going to dump all of the costs onto the ISPs. At least China has the good grace to pay for it themselves.
There are others out there who know much more about this issue than I do. Anyone care to offer a cost estimate for this plan? Include all costs: equipment, time, people etc, to set up a censorship system capable of blocking access from each and every European internet user to any and all sites globally that might contain instructions on bomb making. Don't forget to add the costs of finding those sites in the first place: and of dealing with false positives. We'll then divide that by the number of users to give us a per capita cost. We might also compare it to the damage done by terrorism. See whether it's worth it, shall we?
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The EU officials must know very well that it is not possible for ISP's to filter the internet. They also know that China, as a growing economy of 1 billion people, is as such anything but comparable to a mere internet company (not to mention the ways China sensors the net, which is not very fine-tuned: if someone uses a massive blogger site to write "anti-Chinese" material, the whole domain will be blacklisted). The officials again know this, but it is besides the point. Since the individual ISP's trying to censor the net is by no means sensible, if even possible, the only effective way is to centralize the censorship under control of the EU, and - unless they're totally lost - this is what the initiative is about. A lovely initiative indeed. The fact that everyone who really needs to is able to penetrate the censors is again irrelevant, since this has not to do with controlling terrorism but - in the long term - controlling normal citizens.