American Buddhist Net

The American blogosphere is going increasingly “viral” about a proposal advanced at the recent meeting of the Davos Economic Forum by Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, that an equivalent of a “driver’s licence” should be introduced for access to the web. This totalitarian call has been backed by articles and blogs in Time magazine and the New York Times.

As bloggers have not been slow to point out, the system being proposed is very similar to one that the government of Red China reluctantly abandoned as too repressive.

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The freedom to speak your mind should be considered a fundamental human right. Without the freedom to write and say what you want, all other rights are next to meaningless. Governments fear the Internet not because it is "wild," but because it provides information they cannot control. Have you heard of a single grass-roots movement to control the Internet or to curtail freedom of speech? I doubt it. Regressive speech laws are always the products of governments or their fellow-travelers in think tanks and universities. People who want to control the Internet or abridge your right to speak your mind are enemies of human progress. ABN