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China Congratulates EU on AT&T's Amendments Being Accepted to the Telecoms Package
By HUNG Chao-Kuei on Sunday, March 8 2009, 23:02 - Permalink
We, the Chinese government, would like to congratulate the European Union for its Parliament's acceptance of the amendments pushed by AT&T to the "Telecoms Package". These changes would make the Internet structure of EU more compatible to that of China, though controlled by entities of different interests. Most importantly, regulation of improper speeches will become so much easier if such amendments are fully accepted and the package becomes law.
For example, Wikipedia has always been a source of headache for the Chinese government and the Copyright Enforcers alike. Entries such as Falun Gong, the IP filtering notes about AT&T, and AACS encryption key are very unfriendly to us, and therefore harm the society, since we represent the interest of the entire society. With these amendments, we can better prevent the spread of such harmful information to the society.
P2P networks, the common enemy of the Chinese government
and the Copyright Enforcers, can also be tamed to behave
or even completely eliminated once these amendments become law.
We have always believed that the existence of the Freenet is not only
a threat to our control protection of our people
against improper contents and opinions, but also a threat
to the Copyright Enforcers. It is very encouraging to see
EU ignore the "freedom speech" activitis who support the
existence of the disturbing P2P networks.
Our society is still one step ahead of EU thanks to the
control protection provided by the
Golden Shield Project, behind which our people are
better immuned from these improper websites and messages
(although such protection is slightly compromised by the Freenet).
However, we see that EU is catching up very quickly with
these amendments. As
explained (search for all occurrences of "intermediaries")
by Lawrence Lessig in his book "Code V2", it will become
increasingly easy for one single entity to control the entire
infrastructure of a region as large as Europe when the market
of the network providers consolidates. We will gladly share our
technical experiences with the emerging controller, be it
the EU government or the head of Copyright Enforcer,
whoever has the final say. (Wink wink!)
We look forward to further cooperation opportunities with
EU as it evolves into a totalitarian
totally reigned state.
OK ok I admit... My mother tongue is not English and my major is neither law nor politics. Please correct me if there are any linguistic and/or factual mistakes. I am not a citizen of China ... (yet?) nor a citizen of any European country. If I were, I wouldn't be allowed to write such an improper article. (What? You said there is freedom of speech in EU? OK, maybe you are right, for now. But tell me about that after this Telcoms Package becomes law with AT&T's amendments completely unchallenged.) So why do I care? Because my constantly harassed island country -- Taiwan -- sits next to China, my Chinese friends are frustrated about their governments control over their network activities, and because my blog lives in Europe. Also because the Internet makes what happens in one place relevant to people living in other places. If AT&T gets away with it in EU, it may very well try the same thing anywhere else in the world. So please read the article and join the protest at La Quadrature du Net.