Tokyo Madness
January 26th, 2008 Thomasso Posted in Blog and Web Tech, General | Comments Off
It was a few weeks ago, OK it was on January 17, 2008 to be precise, as I was listing to a CBC Radio One program called Search Engine that focuses on the Internet and how it has evolved and affects our lives. Well back then they did a story on the Japanese government’s initiatives to crack down and control the Internet within the next few years–this tweaked my interest. Check the web page from Search Engine regarding the story they aired called : Japanese Internet to be gov’t controlled by 2010. So I asked myself this question: “Would the people of Japan advocate such measures by their government?” But the bigger question, “Would we tolerate it if that were to happen here…”
Japan’s government plans to impose comprehensive state regulation of the Internet by the end of the decade (link). There are three initiatives: one covers file sharing, one covers mobile web access (a huge phenomenon in Japan) and finally, one covers websites- classifying them under the same guidelines as television and radio, and making little distinction for peer-to-peer communication.
My biggest concern is what this would mean if the Canadian government were to lay down such rules and controls, for example my Blog, my “soup-box” to the world, would it be looked at as a publication that would need to be thoroughly checked by “Big Brother” and then I would need to qualify my content under the CRTC guide-lines? This is scary–censorship. I see the Internet as the true bastion of freedom of the world, where geopolitical borders are none-existent and freedom to see and hear exceeds all control from any one authority–although I am sadly mistaken because today it is not 100 percent free. But you get the point, right?
Anyway, I found a cool Blog while looking at the CBC’s Search Engine web page on this episode. Tokyo Mango is the name of the woman who they had interviewed, and I believe she lives in down in California, and is Japanese herself? She keeps an eye on what is going over their in Japan–in a Western point of view–that you can read on her weBlog. She comments on the how much the Japanese people use the Internet, and how much of their lives are spent on things such as text-messaging and other various web content. There, it seems, they go way beyond some of the trends that we in the West have evolved into while on-line. Totally different culture on-line in Japan.
If you want to listen to the Search Engine Pod-cast, click here, to down load it. It’s 12.8 MB, 28 minutes long. It is actually a really informative show.
