Next G8 President Wants To "Regulate the Internet"

antispam_ben writes "The President of Italy, which will have the Presidency of the G8 starting January 1, says he wants to use the future position of Italy to 'Regulate the Internet.' Italy's President Berlusconi appears to be a cantankerous character, prompting riots when Italy last had the G8 presidency in 2001. This will no doubt be a serious effort, but knowing the fundamental design of the Internet involves routing around damage, the efforts could be more amusing than threatening." Update — 12/5 at 00:04 by SS: Reader fondacio noted that Silvio Berlusconi is Italy's Prime Minister, not its President. He is Italy's G8 representative, and Italy will hold the presidency in 2009.

It'll never happen.

Never happen. The mafia will just disappear him. ;)

Re:It'll never happen.

First, there's not only one mafia. The mafia you know is the sicilian mafia, whose focus is mainly on drugs and "pizzo" (a fee asked as an insurance that nothing happens to your possessions). In other regions in the south, there are 'ndrangheta (in Calabria), Camorra (in Campania, the region where Naples is) and Sacra Corona Unita (in Puglia, the "heel of the boot"). Then, you have the kidnappers in Sardinia.

Ndrangheta makes money mainly from kidnapping, "pizzo" and control, plus the usual stuff. Sacra Corona Unita is not very frequently in the news. Camorra is behind everything can be pumped money from in Campania: from drugs to pizzo to garbage collection and disposal, as you heard in the news recently, even to undertakers (yep, you read correctly). All these mafias are deeply rooted in the local behavior, with the population either supporting directly or indirectly. Moreover, they have strong connections with politics, either with the local Communes or regional administrations or even at the State level. It is not unheard of that some illuminated major has been found burned alive chained to his car just because he fired an employee, so in this picture, even if you want to change things, you really cannot.

Therefore, the mafia does what carries them money. They don't do strong public events if they can prevent it, because that would likely involve an outburst of police. Making Berlusconi disappear would be a very strong act, something that mafia is unlikely to do unless strongly menaced (something that happened with two judges, Falcone and Borsellino). Please note that politicians have been killed in Italy (eg. Aldo Moro) by extremist left-wing terrorists (the so called Brigate Rosse) which do not have anything to do with mafia.

In the north of italy (eg. from florence up north) mafia does exists, but because of the many southerns that moved in, and brought some activity. The people from the North of italy are very different, and they dont' like the southeners at all. Some actually consider them Italian-speaking africans.

Re:It'll never happen.

I'd recommend "Gomorrah", written by a Camorra... 'expatriate', so to speak, in hiding in Sweden (or England?); the Camorra bosses stated he'd be dead by Christmas. It's been translated to English. The Camorra is easily the strongest, the most modern, as they evolved to a focus on sheer business and not the older trappings of the other 'clans' or organizations. All that aside: the AC above me is correct, as far as my observations since I've been here.

Re:It'll never happen.

Not at all.
Italy is a strange country. Basically every city is a different country, with different traditions, people behavior, food, dialect (which is unintelligible from italian). You can travel 30 km and find a completely different kind of Italy. The traditional image you have of Italians is mainly the one of the south, made popular by the emigration and movies. The productive North is seldomly known, and the administrative Center, with Rome, is in the news for political reasons.

So, when you speak about Italy and italians, you should keep in mind that it is a very strong generalization. Despite this, what can I say? I'm italian, I moved abroad since years, I won't go back, ever. I think Italy is a very nice country with all its arts and good food, but there are too many idiots and bigots.

No authority

Since the "President of the G8" doesn't have the authority to do SQUAT, who cares?

Re:No authority

Since the "President of the G8" doesn't have the authority to do SQUAT, who cares?

Since the president is the guy who decides on the G8 meetings toilet breaks, I think you will live to regret those words! With an unlimited supply of water and "one john to rule them all", Berlusconi will show the leaders of the world what happends when you cross him.

Enforcement not regulation is the answer

The Internet does not need to be regulated. Instead what needs to happen is for all of the major countries of the world (including Russia and China) to start cooperating and prosecuting computer fraud where people misrepresent themselves to steal information and use it for personal gain. These laws already exist in most countries and the goal should be to extend them into the far corners of the globe along with a willing police force or the ability for Interpol to operate where needed.

Re:Enforcement not regulation is the answer

Exactly. This is a classic instance of creating more ridiculous laws, rules and regulations rather than simply enforcing what's already in place. I've seen the same approach used to try to "clean up" the Internet to get rid of child porn. Special filters and laws don't need to be created to ban child pornography from the Internet. There are already laws against it... just enforce them and leave the rest of us alone. To catch a predator is a great example - that show uses existing laws to nail those guys.

Stop him!

What he is doing is useless, as Tor (for anonymous browsing), I2P (for anonymous fast downloading) and Freenet (for anonymous data storage) make such filters obsolete even before they are implemented.

The internet to Prez Berlusconi:

fuck.it

Not the president

Berlusconi is not the president of Italy. He's the prime minister. The president is Giorgio Napolitano [wikipedia.org].

It's About Time

The efficiency of a multinational organization and
the effectiveness of the Italian president will finally
make my internet experience safe and unoffensive.
This truly is a golden age.

Not specific enough!

What the fuck does "regulate the inernet" actually mean? It could mean anything!

1. announce plans to regulate internet
2. ???
3. profit

Censorship - not Regulation

Whack him as crazy all you want, but the truth is that he's crazy and despotic. From TFA:

Berlusconi owns swathes of the Italian mass media.

The left-wing newspaper L'Unita wrote: "You can not say that it is not a disturbing proclamation, given that the only countries in the world where there are filters or restrictions against internet are countries ruled by dictatorial regimes: those between China, Iran, Cuba, Saudi Arabia."

And -

Any G8 move next year to "regulate the internet" led by Berlusconi is likely to attract criticism. He has often been accused of using his power to try to silence dissent. He lost a long-running libel battle against The Economist earlier this year after it said he was not "fit to run Italy" and was this week suing American critic Andrew Stille for defamation.

More on this guy - http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/world/europe/02italy.html?_r=1&ref=europe [nytimes.com]

Beppe Grillo take on it

Here for his post http://www.beppegrillo.it/eng/2008/12/open_letter_to_rupert_murdoch.html [beppegrillo.it]

Beppe Grillo is an Italian *comedian* turned blogger turned person fed up with the current state of italian affairs. He tried (so far in vain) to promote laws signed by the populace, which would not allow politicians to be in the Parliament if they have been convicted by courts.

On any other country (well, most of them) this would be implied, wouldn't it?

No chance!

Read on to http://www.beppegrillo.it/eng/condannati_parlamento.php [beppegrillo.it] for the state of the art of the Italian parliament.

25 politicians in the Italian and European parliament convicted by courts.

Did they steal candy? No chance.

We're talking about judge corruption, extortion, that sort of stuff.

On topic: Berlusconi seems he'd like now to create a UNIQUE ID for every net citizen so that they'd be univocally identified on the Internet.

Sigh.

Good

I assume that since many people here support govt. regulation of industry and commerce, they should be all for this idea. I mean, if a complex system like the economy cannot function well without govt. regulation, a complex system like the internet cannot either.

Re:Good

Absolutely! No more allowing people just to connect to the Internet with any address they choose! Instead, I propose some sort of standard Internet Protocol address. And a central organization to assign everyone those addresses. Then, we can have some sort of header on every packet that will describe the source and destination address.

Perhaps we could have a central organization who would assign names to those addresses. And they could standardize the naming schemes, and the protocols the naming servers use!

nahh... that's just too much regulation :)

hooray, win will ensue!

It has been said before, and I will repeat it here.

The internet treats censorship like damage and simply routes around it.

This "war on free information" (isn't the the en vogue thing to call a power struggle?) like every other idealogical war, cannot be won, and is counterproductive.
With every "blow" to us (us being those that desire freedom of information) we simply grow smarter, stronger, and more sophisticated in our measures to ensure the integrity of our freedoms.
Our numbers are so so so so so much greater than theirs. Every time one of us is jailed, or sued, or defamed 10 pop up as replacements. Every attempt to silence our voices results in us retreating further and further into obscurity and anonymity.

I welcome an information war between those of us who want freedom of communication and those that don't. We, who have greater resources, intellect, and numbers, will prevail.

Re:hooray, win will ensue!

"Every attempt to silence our voices results in us retreating further and further into obscurity and anonymity."

Yeah, sounds like we're really winning the war on censorship and defending our rights to free speech... Here's a hint, if you have to say something in increasingly anonymous and more obscure ways, you're losing.

No government can ever prevent anything completely, only to degrees. The more they crack down, the more things will be done in secrecy, and the less people will actually do them at all. This is why the wars on drugs and terror have been such abysmal failures, they failed to curb the behaviors at all (perhaps even encouraging them!) and have had hardly any effect on the degree of publicity people who do them are willing to expose themselves to; by comparison, the war on child pornography has gotten people using increasingly obscure means of communication and distribution, kiddie porn still exists and probably always will, but I remember a time not so long ago when one could actually come across http sites openly hosting child porn for all to see.

This post is not intended to support or endorse any particular view on the issues it mentions, simply to state a point on government suppression in general.

The Internet is already regulated

Since Berlusconi didn't expand on what he meant, the Register article is slightly alarmist. Maybe he wants to regulate download speeds, or legislate net neutrality? The bald statement of wanting to "regulate the internet" is worthless. If he did want to restrict freedom of speech, and an E.U. directive were put forward, it would still need to be passed into national law by the E.U. member states, and even if that occurred it could still be challenged at the European Court under the Human Rights legislation.

But realistically, the Internet is already regulated. Try putting a copy of Photoshop or pornography involving a 15 year old girl on your web page and see how long it lasts. The question is not whether the Internet is regulated, but the level of regulation. In China, criticising the government is prohibited. In the Middle East, pornography is prohibited. In the United States, reproducing commercial sensitive data is prohibited via copyright and patent laws, in Germany Nazi memorabilia is prohibited. Every society has its limits.

Streissand effect

Look at what happend to 4chan and "anonymous" over the last year of so. Somebody posted a video of Tom Cruise acting like...well...like himself. Scientology's attempts to take this video down caused a bunch of idiots to start posting videos on youtube and..well...acting like idiots. Scientology's further attempts to silence them have caused what started as a joke to turn into a national-news-making group of resourceful, hate-filled individuals bent on "dispelling your organization from the internet and systematically dismantling it blah blah blah"

I predict: Cisco makes a shitload of money selling filters
a shitload of jobs are created to maintain all the censoring equipment
a shitload of our money is spent to prevent us from communicating with one another
a shitload of computer illiterates get angry when whatever side effects of this "regulation" start occuring
a small number of geeks create a tool to allow a slightly larger number of geeks to continue doing what geeks have done since their beginning...that is: whatever they want.

Its inevitable

Not today, not tomorrow, but someday you can expect content regulation to take place.

As we lose control little by little of our hardware, software, documents ( DRM ), its just a matter of time.

This man is a genius.

Truly, Prime Minister Berlusconi is a great man, a marvel, the pinnacle of international leadership, and an example to us all.

When Obama was elected as President, he was the first to compliment him on his suntan.

Berlusconi v The Internet

I expect that Berlusconi's definition of "regulate the Internet" is "make it stop competing with my television stations". Italians are to get their porn exclusively from him.

Own it

I guess he wants to own the internet, just like he owns most of the mass media in Italy. Good luck with that!