Take My Hammer, I’ve Got a Rock

Government intervention in Internet regulation poses its obvious threat to the people. The very way Egyptians have been able to band together to demand reform will be dismantled. From the Government’s perspective, media censorship is good because you can prevent civil uprisings. A con is that they wouldn’t be able to use the tools of the Internet to their advantage to take care of their problems from the source. If people are gathering in a public forum online and complaining about a problem then any government official could spy on the forum and take preventative measures against a revolution. Disgruntle citizens of a nation will find a way to gather and communicate a revolt, with or without the Internet. Besides, didn’t the most successful revolutions take place before the Internet was even thought of? The Internet is merely a tool to a beast much older than the Internet itself: civil unrest. Radical notions do indeed spread much quicker with the use of Internet, but they can just as easily be counteracted in a similar, speedy fashion. Taking an outlet away from the people is taking away an outlet from themselves. Then again, we live in a world where governments tell people how many children they can have. Our parents saw mass genocide committed by a government. Taking away a nation’s right to simple Internet access doesn’t seem too farfetched or even cruel in this light. I think us Americans are a little spoiled sometimes and forget that our rights were earned at a high price. With that said, If a majority of your citizenship is convening against you on the Internet, maybe you should take a look at why that is happening and how you can make it better instead of how you can make it go away. You can throw a rug over dirt, but it’s still going to be there until you put some work into picking it up.