"¿Cómo combatir las violaciones de la propiedad intelectual y los contenidos xenófobos y racistas y de pornografía infantil en Internet?" Esta es la pregunta que la Presidencia española de la UE hace a sus socios comunitarios en un documento (PDF) que los ministros de Justicia de la UE van a discutir de manera informal hoy.

National Assembly approves law requiring ISPs to block access to list of banned websites in the name of fighting child pornography, but critics point out that purveyors of this obscene material long ago turned to encrypted P2P methods to deliver content, making filtering efforts pointless and jeopardizing free speech in the process. [...]

A study by journalist Fabrice Epelboin on the business of child pornography notes that most already use encrypted P2P networks to distribute content. [...]

BARCELONA, Spain--Josh Silverman, the chief executive of Skype, the voice over Internet phone service, could tick off the names of mobile phone operators that block his company's service.
But for Silverman, a 41-year-old Michigan native, it is quicker to name those that allow it, no strings attached.

Critics of government-mandated filtering schemes contend that such programs first focus on "child pornography" because it's such an unobjectionable target for censorship—but once the program is in place, it's much easier to extend it to more controversial areas, such as copyright protection. At least the French have the decency to admit that this is what's happening.

The French lower house, the National Assembly, has just passed a security bill known as LOPPSI2, [...]

THE FRENCH PARLIAMENT has buckled under pressure and approved the Sarkozy government's authoritarian plans to censor the Internet.

WASHINGTON — Declaring that an attack on one nation’s computer networks “can be an attack on all,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton issued a warning on Thursday that the United States would defend itself from cyberattacks, though she left unclear the means of response. [...]

The stand against China will rightly be lauded. But western states also imperil internet freedom

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In the past several years, internet censorship has spread rapidly throughout a range of political systems. According to the Open Net Initiative, a consortium of academics and computer scientists who track censorship trends, the number of countries that censor the internet has gone from a handful a decade ago to almost 40 today – and the censorship club's fastest growing membership segment consists of democracies. [...]