Cracking Down on Internet Dissent

February 16th, 2005 at 09:10 Björn Hallberg

As reported by Drudge and the Inquirer, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) will begin looking at tightening restrictions on political activities on the Internet.

Now that was a little scary. While it initially, and for the non conspiratorial amongst us, doesn’t sound so bad, it can be. I suspect this is only an initial step. And that the US will eventually pass laws that allow for ANY political content to be removed at a whim. While it’s supposedly only to related to election campaigning there is no telling how the rules will be decided. What is a campaign after all? A year before an election? Two years?

Obviously this has little to do with fair campaigning. Just as you can’t arrest people on the street or in a restaurant who debate politics, yet anyway. The amount of blogs that would accept funding and not tell are virtually non-existent. But they do exist I am sure. And that gives an ample reason for the elite in Washington to try and crack down on free speech on the Internet. Which they and quite a few others in the higher strata of society, all over the world, have wanted in a long time. But arguably the US is a little ahead of the rest of us when it comes to campaigning and political web sites so it’s no surprise that we should see the trend here first.

Bottom line, the Internet is out of control as far as the elite is concerned. Most of it is free, there is little control, little commercial structure to feed from and there are dozens of radical web sites out there that work against the government in a way that must be very threatening in the long run. Thousands of little Chomskys brooding over the state of the world and starting to see the cracks in the wall.

Entry 31 filed under: Media. This entry was posted 3 years, 9 months ago. RSS feed for comments on this post.