From: rishab@dxm.org (Rishab Aiyer Ghosh)
Date: Mon, 2 Sep 1996 08:07:20 +0800
To: amehta@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in (Arun Mehta)
Subject: Re: DON'T Nuke Singapore Back into the Stone Age
In-Reply-To: <1.5.4.32.19960831063502.0033b25c@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in>
Message-ID: <199609012218.PAA13546@nic.cerf.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Arun Mehta wrote:
> and India will be too: the law here holds the ISPs responsible
> for ensuring that nothing objectionable and obscene is carried by
> them, and what simpler way to comply than to

FWIW: "There is no need to licence content providers; Internet
service providers are not responsible for illegal content." R K
Takkar, Indian Telecom Secretary (at the time of interview); see
http://dxm.org/techonomist/news/ndp1.html for more.

> Ideally, I should be able to 
> send via pgp and anonymous remailer a request for a page, which would soon
> come beamed down unencrypted via satellite. No more waiting hours
> for the latest version of Netscape to download

(!) you'll only have to wait hours for your anonymous-remailer-web-to-e-mail
gateway, EVERY time you want a page. 

In one of my Electric Dreams columns, "Censorship is bad for business,"
(archived here and there on the Web) I wrote that governments will 
eventually see sense and stop censorship, if they're interested in
making their countries rich. Singapore in every other field of work
has shown its interest in deregulation; I would expect them to do so
on the Net as well, when it becomes clear that there's rather more to
it than porn and subversion. In the meanwhile, there's not much point 
trying to "help" them, apart from providing moral support. Incidentally,
do the cypherpunk archives in Singapore, which always come out first
in my AltaVista searches, not contain a trace of officially disliked
content?

In this month's First Monday, due out tomorrow, Andreas Harsono -
a banned Indonesian journalist who reports from Jakarta through the
Internet for various foreign publications - writes on censorship
in S-E Asia, and how some countries, like Indonesia, are _more_
relaxed in their treatment of on-line media than the press.

Best,
Rishab
ps. I don't read the list regularly, so reply by mail if you want
a response.

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