Two interesting, albeit distressing bits of news coming from two economic powerhouses, both located in Asia, both screwing around with online rights.

Japan has become the first country in the world where its ISPs will actively hunt down “copyright infringing file-sharers” and effectively pull the plug on their Internet access. Government legislation gone bad? Hardly. It’s Japan’s four major Internet service providers who decided collectively and independently to go ahead and police their networks, apparently due to government inaction on the situation (they had cited privacy concerns over such patrolling) and, you know the drill, pressure from the movie, music and software industries.

This is the perfect example as to why decent network neutrality legislation needs to exist in Canada before our own ISPs go vigilante like these did, without regard for moral and legal considerations. Not to mention the precarious precedent this act sets, as countries like France and the UK have been thinking (our country probably too) of enabling the same type “solution” to file sharing, and will most likely be observing very carefully so as to not reproduce the same mistakes within their own borders.

Meanwhile, over in China, YouTube was cut off from public access on Sunday after a series of protest videos in Tibet surfaced on the video sharing site. The videos were of the Lhasa demonstrations and other similar support protests abroad. China’s track record on Internet filtering goes on in less-than-stellar fashion, letting their 212 million Internet users know they can’t take the heat. Just another reason to boycott the Olympics.

Update: Turns out Google News and CNN are being blocked by the Chinese government as well.

TorrentFreak: Japanese ISPs Agree to Ban Pirates from the Internet
Wired: China Blocks YouTube Over Tibet Videos

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 11:01 am and is filed under censorship, china, Industry, japan, lhasa, Net Neutrality, News, p2p, tibet, youtube. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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