Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow has an interesting tale on his blog, This Modern World, about censorship and the Internet. In a nutshell, a fan of his in Kuwait bought one of his collections of cartoons, The Great Big Book of Tomorrow from Amazon, but the package was opened by Kuwaiti censors at customs and a page was torn from the book. Tom replies:
The cartoon that the guardians of morality in Kuwait found offensive can be seen here. It’s the same cartoon that the guardians of morality in Oklahoma found so offensive when it first ran (more on that here). It’s nice to know that my little cartoon can help fundamentalists the world over discover how much they really have in common.
What’s also interesting, of course, is that that cartoon can be viewed by that same reader in Kuwait online... unless, now that now that that dangerous radical Tom Tomorrow is on the Kuwaiti’s radar, his site is blocked by government censoring.
There’s that old saying about the Net perceiving censorship as damage and routing around it, but that’s a fantasy that is increasingly becoming even more fantastical as national governments enable filters to weed out what they consider offensive, and as megacorp ISPs try to expand their control even further. There’s this in today’s Los Angeles Times:
It's never been easy to win a fight against people who buy ink by the barrel. The same may be true about those who buy bandwidth by the terabit — as a coalition fighting Internet giant AOL discovered Thursday.A group of 600 organizations that includes the AFL-CIO and the Gun Owners of America has been circulating an online petition protesting AOL's plans to begin charging extra to route e-mail around its spam filters.
On Thursday, though, the world's biggest Internet service provider blocked e-mails containing links to the petition against the "CertifiedEmail" plan at DearAOL.com.
AOL called it a simple technical glitch and fixed the problem by midafternoon.
Riiight. But even if this was accidental, all it does is demonstrate that AOL can’t be trusted to handle email fairly... and now they want emailers to pay a premium for poor service? As Wes Boyd, president of online political group MoveOn.org Civic Action, points out in the Times:
It's an example of our point: that they are arbitrary and capricious in the way they deliver e-mail. If AOL can just decide without consultation of anyone that they can censor a website, then what are the chances for democracy?
Pretty damn slim, I’d say. Until some geek figures out a way around AOL censors...
