US Congress passes 'COPE' legislation

[Arcmanov]

The US congress have officially sounded the death knell on free, public speech and expression on the internet via the passing of the COPE (Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement) Act. 

Under the guise of 'the enhancement of IP-technology delivery and services', this bill was passed almost like a 'thief in the night', with the full backing of some of the biggest telecom providers in the US.

More details here:  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/09/1427218

Oh, and if you think this is a non issue, consider this: If the telecom providers can now operate ('deliver') the internet as their own private network, then they can effectively block/control the spread of certain types of information across the internet, if that information is deemed (by them) to be 'against their business interests'.
An obvious eventuality of this would be the suppression of a lot of free speech advocacy websites and most likely, the suppression of a lot of weblog (blog) sites, where authors get to say what they want, about who they want, whenever they want.

In essence, 'The Man' has moved one significant step toward 'owning' the internet.  If knowledge/information is power, then I can see some troubling times ahead.

Your thoughts?

[TriniXaeno]

Conspiracy theorists will have a field day with this no doubt......but personally, I think the internet can and has been used to carry a lot of nasty and dangerous messages.

I'm all for a bit of censorship in that regard. Of course, that sort of control can lend itself readily to abuse.

Hopefully it would be the lesser of the two evils.

[Andrew_005]

After seeing those 9/11 government conspiracy videos i now se why they would've wanted to do that, the government of the US is moving closer to controlling freedom for all of us.... this video is over 1 hour long but i couldn't move from the monitor, maybe you ppl need to watch this to find out why the US government would want to do stuff like this...