Argument Against Internet Censorship

Don’t you dare touch the internet

I thought that with the government of thailand starting to censor their internet and china continuing to rack up it’s human rights violation it would be good for someone to defend the internet. The thing is that most people don’t realise is that the internet basically is an extension of the freedom of speech and the censorship of it is illegal.

So I state that the internet shouldn’t be censored at any grade since it violates human rights, it can greatly affect the nation's economy, it’s expensive and hard to censor the entire internet.

My first argument is that the censorship helps to create a middle income trap.The middle class trap is when society has risen from poverty and a new class is created, but

If Sweden, for example were to enact some law that enables internet censorship it would compromises their constitutional laws. The Swedish foundation law states that you have the right to publish whatever you want as long as it is inside the boundaries of the law and that the Swedish agencies are not allowed to investigate what’s aired in tv, radio or any other electronic device. So enacting a law that censors the internet would mean that the government is doing something illegal which out of a political view would mean suicide. Quoting article 18 of the universal human rights “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” (UN, New York, 10/12/15) From this we can clearly see that any kind of censorship directly violates the human rights since the internet is an extension of the freedom of speech. Last but not least censoring the internet violates the definition of freedom. According to the Oxford dictionary the definition of freedom is “The power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants.” (Oxford, 2007) So if I were to summarise this it would be like. Every way the internet is censored would result in the restrictions of freedom which then would result in the removal

There are several ways for a government to censor the internet, The most usual and realistic ones are either URL-based blocking, blocking the IP address or DNS-based blocking . The DNS-based blocking is the worst of them and it’s completely flawed. It’s based on the government giving the internet providers certain ISP’s and the internet provider simply blocks the whole domain. This creates a problem with both under and overblocking. If someone posts a comment on a forum there are no way of just removing that comment. The internet provider has to block the entire site which of course isn’t good. The second problem with DNS-based blocking is that it’s super easy to unblock a page you only have to change your domain name. This means that the one censoring will have to keep the blocked sites under supervision or they will probably just open it again under a slightly different name. Although the problem with IP-based blocking is pretty much the same as DNS, IP-based address blocking is a bit harder to circumvent and one thing that the government could do to improve its efficiency is to block entire neighborhoods, But this will increase the collateral damage with several thousand percent. The URL-based blocking on the other hand is a bit different and better with the state only blocking certain parts of the site. This has the effect of decreasing