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I. Dissent and the Internet Hard to regulate. No way to block information. Many new users/sites daily. It is hard to censor the Internet. Around the world, governments, schools, special interest groups, families and governments are trying to find acceptable ways of tapping into the riches of the internet without hitting problems. With its ability to carry all kinds of information across borders and oceans in a flash, the Internet has evolved faster than the lies and technical infrastructures of the nations it touches. Internet experts say: no way to effectively block information. Brian Ek, one industry expert: First, no matter what technologies we come up with, somewhere, somehow, someone is going to figure out a way to circumvent them. That's the nature of programming. Second, there is an ocean of Web pages and news groups already out there, and being able to rate them all, with several hundred new ones coming on line every day, is an impossibility. Biggest obstacle to control: the design of the Internet itself. It was created during the cold war to allow uninterrupted routing of data traffic even in the event of a nuclear war. Millions of host computers today. It is as easy to retrieve data files from halfway around the world as it is to get a file from the computer on the next desk -- and the data path may snake through dozens of cities and countries along the way. Trying to keep certain kinds of information from entering a jurisdiction is as difficult as keeping certain kinds of molecules from entering a country's air space, or certain kinds of fish from swimming in its waters. China. Internet eroding
China's strong control over national media. Truly International medium;
hard to control. Access can be very easy. No explicit laws in China yet on the Internet. Because the Internet is so new, no agency has responsibility for it. Internet gradually becoming a source of news in China. Some Chinese media expanding into the Web. Dissident journals now are widely distributed over the Internet. On the day that veteran dissident Wei Jing Sheng was released from prison and sent to the US in 1998, political tracts trumpeting the event popped up in e mailboxes all over the country. Making the rounds more recently were copies of the International Covenant on Civil and Political rights that China recently signed, together with a report on the arrest of democracy activists. China has been cracking
down some. December 1998: Shanghai prosecutors charged a local Internet
entrepreneur, Lin Hai, with conspiring to bring down the government. His
crime: swapping 30K e-mail addressees with a Chinese-dissident magazine
based in the US. His wife says: he did not care about the politics; only
wanted to expand his business by doubling the mailing list. The case has
chilled China's growing electronic commerce, which depends on email lists
as its primary marketing tool. While China blocks some WWW news sites
that originate overseas, many others remain open. For more on this general
issue, see the Electronic Frontier Foundation's site (http://www.eff.org).
For more on the Lin Hai case, see http://www.eff.org/udhr/lin_hai_release.html) Korea. New York Times. "Internet Recharges Reformers in Korea." (2/29/2000). Koreans who were in the streets, protesting, in the 1980s, today are relying increasingly on the Internet as a means of getting their message to the public. The result has been a snowballing of reform in the country (aided, too, by the current President, Kim Dae Jung). "In a country where political demonstrations remain tightly restricted, the new groups have invented what they call Internet rallies, for recruiting members, exchanging opinions, organizing letter-writing, debating and publishing policies." "Simply put, our goal is political reform," said Jang Won, 44, a professor of environmental studies, whose group is a major player in the civic coalition. "We want to drive out corrupt politicians. We want to force the parties to adopt transparent processes for selecting candidates, and we want to break the pattern of politics run by charismatic leaders who play on regional differences." Normally cautious traditional media (such as newspapers and TV) have rushed to try to match the civic groups' information, or at least report it, so as not to appear irrelevant. J. Community and the Internet For those who do
not see themselves much in the traditional media, Internet can provide
a gateway to a wider community. Derrick Brown, a grad student at Georgia
Institute of Technology in Atlanta: visited various African American sites
for years. "Basically, they present a perspective and news you are
not going to see every week" at other sites. But hard to keep up
with all of this. So he started UNIVERSAL BLACK PAGES, a directory to
keep abreast of African American sites. The directory initially listed
800 sites; now includes thousands. Huge range of things from Black Scuba
Divers, to Young Black Entrepreneurs, on line edition of Ebony, Essence
and Black Enterprise, Urban Sports Network, Black Golfers. --- Minority
Golf Assn of America. The result: Universal Black pages: http://www.ubp.com.
Other sources include Ebony magazine: http://www.ebonymag. com, Essence:
http://www.essence.com, Black Enterprise: http://www.blackenterprise.com,
Urban Sports Network: http://urbansportsnetwork.com (1) Immediacy: right now, 24 hours a day (2) Ubiquity: Wherever you are (3) Transparency: everything is available (4) Relevancy: Directly relates to you, not to a mass market. A. Origins and Early Development. 1. Cold War origins 2. ARPANET (1969-70s) 3. 1980s: Internet
growth.
Foreign
Affairs lacking some voices of dissent More debate is needed
on the Government's stance that Indonesian unity is paramount for Australia,
writes Hamish McDonald.
Free trade: the icon that has enslaved Kim Beazley http://www.theage.com.au/news/20000803/A46052-2000Aug2.html
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