Oh The Irony!

When I was in Leipzig last week I happened to visit the "Runde Ecke" Museum to see the permanent exhibition there: "Stasi - Power and Banality." Actually 'happened' isn't really fair because it was one of the reasons I wanted to go to what was the second most important city in East Germany between 1945 and 1989.

Anyway, during the two hours I spent there I got talking to a young German male, in his late twenties I would guess, and we discussed state control and the implications of its course of action when applied in a democratic society - oh yes, this was a strokey beard moment way out east. I brought up the subject of Google and China and how the Chinese Government was recognising, as those of the Warsaw Pact countries had found to their cost, that knowledge is power and the control of access to that knowledge is even more powerful.

How depressing then to return home and discover that due to the calling of a General Election and the use of the 'wash through' option the digital economy bill was passed into legislation last week. The link is to the Guardian article in March and there is a wonderful sense of irony to be had when you follow one of the links only to be told that the page is no longer available!

What is particularly worrying is the fact that, as in the old East Germany, you don't actually have to be guilty of a 'crime' to have your access to the Internet withdrawn, you simply have to be the subject of somebody who believes that there copyright has been infringed. Of course copyright is the thin edge of the wedge and you don't have to be a conspiracy theory fan to appreciate that if you follow the origins of the bill back to its source you will find Peter Mandelson on a yacht off Greece with an executive from one of the worlds leading record companies. My worry isn't so much with the banning of illegal downloads but the implicit control of a tool that has opened up democracy to a great extent. I know that with this access comes responsibility and I was interested to see that Rod Liddle was brought to book recently by the PCC for the article I had commented on, no I didn't have anything to do with it, but we've been here already with certain American 'intelligence' agencies closing down sites because of security fears and the judicious use of word recognition technology. The student whose homework was filtered out by her college because her name is Mary Ann, the rugby club whose site mysteriously closed on its own accord because one of the players nicknames is Osama.

It's too late to do anything about this but any further intrusion into the way information is exchanged on the Internet must be vigorously denied, it is one place where democracy can prevail in a world that grows smaller each day as the tentacles of control grip harder.