
How to Regulate the Internet Without Becoming a Dictator - malloryerik
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/02/18/how-to-regulate-the-internet-without-becoming-a-dictator-uk-britain-cybersecurity-china-russia-data-content-filtering/
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Mirioron
If people wish to subscribe to an authoritarian internet model, then they
should be free to do so. If people wish to subscribe to an open Henry model,
then they should be free to do so. This means that by default the internet
should be open, because you can build an authoritarian system inside an open
system, but you can't do the reverse.

The UK's model is censorship. The open part of the UK's model is due to
practicality - they can't filter and punish everyone that breaks their rules.
Your country has a problem when a retweeting a limerick on Twitter leads to a
half an hour police interview and is recorded as "a hate incident" even though
nothing illegal happened. [1] So the idea that the UK is "a supporter of a
global and open internet, which depends on principles of free speech" sounds
like hot air to me.

> _The U.K. strategy calls for the filtering of data rather than content,
> which is a crucial point of differentiation. Data in this case refers to 1s
> and 0s (“machine-readable” code), while information refers to what the data
> means to humans._

But if you filter data then you necessarily also filter the content or
"information", so the comparison to China makes the UK actually sound worse
even though it isn't.

[1] [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/24/man-
investigated...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/24/man-investigated-
police-retweeting-transgender-limerick/)

