Today is a good day for me.  First, I think a point I’ve been trying to make for months has been proven quite nicely.  Second, I can tell almost the whole story in quotes (less work for me is always good).  So off we go.

Remember this post by Robert Scoble…

Interesting to have been in that room, though, talking about tech policy with one of Barack’s advisers. He told me that Obama is going to make tech (both the policy of, and understanding of) one of the key differentiating points between Obama and McCain. To me that mattered more than who was raising money for the candidates, even as that story swirled all around us.

I linked to it at the time and explained why I thought it was a bad thing…

That being said, and with as little intended offense as is humanly possible, the above quote is profoundly ignorant of what I think are the realities of the world we live in.  Government involvement is not a good thing.  Ever.  Sometimes it's a necessary thing and that is why Governments exist in the first place but its  never preferable. 

Why is that?

Because Government exists to restrict freedoms.  That's their job.  If you get drunk and then hop in your car you are a danger to others around you so Government makes laws to prevent it.  They restrict your freedom to drive based on your intoxication level because of how dangerous your intoxication makes you to others.  But they are restricting your freedom because that is what Government does. 

So the question becomes whether there's something so dangerous on the Internet that it requires the restriction of people's freedoms.

Because there is a danger in Government intervention itself and that is Government's inevitable need to over restrict.  The FCC started as a service that simply assigned frequencies to people so they wouldn't interfere with each other's broadcasts.  But its now grown into an agency that concerns itself with everything said and done on any of those airwaves and which actually doles out punishment for saying things that the Government doesn't approve of. 

If you remember nothing else from this post remember this: Once Government turns its attention to something it will continually place more restrictions on that thing.

Now some might ask me to prove the above statement.  For that, I give you Australia…

Logging into a Bogota internet café last year as I was backpacking around South America, I nearly choked. Australia’s new government had slightly tweaked their election commitment: they no longer wanted to help parents filter the Internet to prevent their children from stumbling on child porn (children don’t watch child porn, and lets not forget the fact that child pornographers have a sophisticated offline network that bypasses technology), but now the government was going to mandate a “clean” feed on everybody. Mandatory censorship on the Internet is not a future I want. It made my blood boil.

It was to be a filtration regime, that the government would censor whatever they thought was deemed censorable. An unaccountable, shady regime using the high moral ground of claiming to look after children, but in subsequent examinations, has proven to be just the start. A recent leak has shown that there has been considerable scope creep. Pornography, gambling, abortion websites - all the good stuff in life that make conservative Christian’s pray for a flood and famine to clean society up - would be part of this black list, despite being perfectly legal for adults. The question isn’t why is the government banning porn and the like; it’s where will the line be drawn and who determines that? We are seeing a moral crusade, cloaking a very real civil rights issue.

Now this is where a lot of people will jump up and say President Obama would NEVER do something like this.  But see, that’s the point.  Maybe he would and maybe he wouldn’t but he’s only going to hold the job for a short period of time (4 to 8 years).  Then someone else will come, and someone else after that, and so on. 

So the question isn’t whether the current President would put up a filter.  It’s “now that we’ve given the Government this power will any President after him ever try to put up a filter?”. 

Given Australia’s current Prime minister is a leftist, and George W. Bush (who is firmly on the right) was asked to consider a similar Internet filter by his Evangelical supporters there’s support for this on both sides.

Which means you can almost guarantee we’ll eventually see something like this in the U.S.’s future.