A Stitch in Haste

No time to flesh these out — just a few quick comments:

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ITEM: I have long been no fan of municipal wi-fi, for the simple reason that Internet access is simply neither a public good nor a natural monopoly. Another reason to be skeptical has just manifested itself in Boston — the wildly popular, and totally innocuous tech blog Boing Boing was (at least briefly) banned by the public wi-fi service, apparently for no other reason than having an embedded Google search link with “safe search” turned off. Hardly a gateway to XXX-rated smut. Remember, he who pays the Internet bill calls the censorship tune.

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ITEM: Both Utah and Canada currently have activist politicians who are trying to partition the Internet into “clean” and “filthy” parts, “for the children.” I can’t speak to the Canadian proposal, but in the U.S. any attempt to restrict adult access to Internet content because “children might see it” is unconstitutional — see my previous posts. (Both stories via TechDirt.)

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ITEM: Speaking of Canada, an Ontario activist legislator has introduced a “cyber-bullying” bill that would allow schools to suspend students who use sites such as MySpace to harass other students — or teachers. Seems to me that schools should be limited to disciplining students for conduct at school or during school functions — not for what the kid does at home on his computer. Or is that Twentieth-Century thinking? (Via Slashdot.)

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ITEM: Still abroad, Russia has decreed that 50% of all news, likely to soon include Internet-disseminated news, must be “positive.” Government manipulation of the media in Russia is, meanwhile, not new news, 50% positive or otherwise. (Via Distributed Intelligence.)

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ITEM: And, finally, the bittersweet news that the relatives of a victim of China’s brutal Communist dictatorship are suing Yahoo! for submissively turning over its data so that the dissident, Yu Ling, could be identified — and neutralized. There’s capitalism, and then there’s selling your soul. The two are not as synonymous as many malcontents like to imagine. But in Yahoo!’s case they were. Shame on them. Previous post, on Google and China, here.

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