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Home > Archives > Democracy

Democracy!

The people’s government in the good and in the evil!

What I am writing it doesn't concern the matters that are usually treated on World Conflicts, but it could influence its existence in the future. You can often hear speaking of a possible regulation of Internet and the Web and every time that an intervention of the governments happens it is to establish what correct is and what is not. It's precisely on this matter that I would like to detain me. The development of what is the Net today it has never depended on government laws or rules and even if to its debuts it was indeed a medium between academic institutions and government entities, it has become a great deal by now more complex and organized. This is a social phenomenon with exponential growth that cannot be, in some way, checked through the normal methods of the law. The Web can be the first footstep toward that global information that finds ample comparisons in all the most important conventions on the laws of the man. I would like to remember the article 19 of the universal Declaration of the la of the man of December 10th 1948 that he/she affirms that the man has: “the right to look for, to receive and to spread information and ideas through every mean and without respects to frontiers” and then also the international Pact on the civil and political rights of December 16th 1966 that it points out in the liberty of expression “the liberty to look for, to receive and to spread information and ideas of every kind, without respect to frontiers, orally or in writing, through the press, in artistic form or through any other mean” (article 19).

Premised this I would like to arrive to the core of the problem that it resides in the most veiled attempt of some government arrangements of taking possession of the Internet tool, arrogating to themselves the right to do laws which are effective all over the world. Is it undeniable ' that it is possible to access the Net from whatever terminal anywhere at the condition that it has the physical faculty of a telephone connection (perhaps in the future with development of satellite technologies this presupposition will come less). Therefore why would a single nation have to arrogate the law to prevent to a proper citizen to complete or no determined actions on the Net? It is ' what it is being tried of doing in Italy, promoting a law that compares every Site on the Web to the periodic publications with that that it follows of it (a duty of registration and possibility to write only for journalists, professionals or publicists.) even if the server where physically it is found memorized such Site is on the othepart of the ocean, in the United States or in Japan for example. It is true ' that other countries as the U.S.A. have already tried to impose normative of this kind, but this is what has been answered by the federal court of the Pennsylvania: “someone can think that there is in Internet forms of offensive communication or also obscene. Surely the absence of regulation has produced a kind of chaos. But the success of Internet has depended on the chaos that it has created. The strength of Internet is also that chaos. As the strength of Internet is the chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends from the chaos and from the cacophony of the demonstrations of thought that the first amendment protects”. Of the same tone the confirmation in appeal of the Federal Supreme Court: “as result of our constitutional tradition... it is had to suppose that the government regulation of the liberty of expression interferes instead to encouraging the free exchange of the ideas. The interest in encouraging the liberty of exprsion in a democratic society overcomes every theoretical but not tried benefits of any censorship.”

Now according to me it's this direction that we have to follow. First rule: no rules! It doesn't want to say anarchy, but only regulation that is not from outside. The same subjects that make possible the existence of Internet have to give some norms to it. So ISP, World Wide Web Consortium (with the other preceded agencies) and, above all, consumers have to act together to make possible that the Netiquette and the Acceptable Use Policies become really legal binding customs. Then we can arrive to a true Democracy by the people and to the people, in the good and in the evil.

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