
Hundreds march in Singapore against website licensing regime - liotier
http://rt.com/news/singapore-website-protest-bloggers-419/
======
wheaties
This isn't an attack on free speach. This has the hallmarks of regulatory
capture. If you're a news organisation whose readership is being undermined by
no moat blots (anyone can set one up and they cost nothing to run) then your
profits are in grave danger. Structurally your business is suspect unless you
can find a way to arbitrarily limit competition.

This license is both arbitrary and expensive. Media sites no longer need to
fear competition from small time blotters or new news upstarted.

~~~
fab1an
The resulting law is nevertheless an attack on free speech, regardless of
alternative underlying motivations.

------
runn1ng
_" It is an international embarrassment when governments around the world are
working to deregulate the Internet, and Singapore, one of the wealthiest
nations per capita, is going in the opposite direction," the activist told
AFP._

I am not sure which governments he speaks about. America? China? Russia?
Middle-Eastern countries with their blasphemy laws?

~~~
nkoren
Iceland? Lovely little country. I've been seriously considering learning
Icelandic lately...

~~~
PhantomGremlin
Does Iceland want immigrants?

Japan, another quite homogenous country (demographically speaking), makes it
quite difficult to immigrate there.

Contrast with the USA, where one of Americas greatest strengths is in
welcoming immigrants. E.g. people like Andy Grove and Sergey Brin and
countless others.

~~~
GFischer
You mean, how it used to welcome inmigrants.

It doesn't anymore. Brin entered in 1979, and Grove in 1957.

Some extremely talented people (for example, one worked with Anders Hejlsberg
developing C#) are still stuck in the extremely long green card process. And,
other than H1B, I don't know of a decent way to get a work visa in the U.S.
(forget about actually inmigrating).

Compare to Canada, where I know there's a sane system for entering, it's still
bureaucratic, but at least it's clear.

Australia is even more open. And while Europe is heterogeneous in its
inmigration policies, it's far better than the U.S.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
Good point. Even by the time Brin entered in 1979, the rules of immigration
had changed. Brin got in easily because we had special rules for Jewish
families trying to get out of the Soviet Union. More recently (in the 2000's)
we did the same thing for certain persecuted people from Africa (a colleague
helped sponsor a family of these; sadly I don't remember the exact
nationality).

But what happened to the "traditional" method of high tech immigration? I.e.
come here for grad school, then stay. Is that all H1B stuff? I know quite a
few people who came here for grad school and then stayed to work in high tech.
They are now citizens. Their children are native born Americans.

------
einhverfr
Reading the article slowly, it's a lot less than it is suggested. To qualify
one must be covering Singapore news and have 50000 unique visitors from
Singapore per month.

I think it is a pretty catastrophic law, but it is not the same as saying all
blogs must be licensed.

~~~
ValentineC
The definition of news according to this regulation is _" any news,
intelligence, report or occurrence or any matter of public interest about any
social, economic, political, cultural, artistic, sporting scientific or any
other aspect of Singapore in any language"_. That covers a lot of ground.

50,000 unique IP addresses (not visitors, as in the article) isn't too hard to
hit either.

Here's the original press release by the regulatory authority:
[http://www.mda.gov.sg/NewsAndEvents/PressRelease/2013/Pages/...](http://www.mda.gov.sg/NewsAndEvents/PressRelease/2013/Pages/28052013.aspx)

~~~
einhverfr
My reading is that they would have to be 50000 unique Singaporian IP addresses
and that weekly coverage of Singaporian news was required as well.

------
jmduke
Wouldn't it be _incredibly_ easy for a government or major news organization
to spam a news blog, causing them to rise over the 50,000-visitor threshold,
thus forcing them to apply for the license?

~~~
mcintyre1994
I think the genius here is twofold. If a blog under that threshold seems
threatening, they can do as you say. But the likelihood of that is kept low by
the fact that people won't advertise their blog. Once a blog hits Twitter,
Reddit or maybe even here and reaches a viral mass, that information spreads
way too fast for a government to control - but who wants that to happen if
they'll have to buy a license?

------
murbard2
Singapore is good for business but bad free speech. Fortunately, anonymous
speech is much more easily done than anonymous business :)

~~~
straight_talk
By doing business in Singapore you're funding this very evil regime.

~~~
Tloewald
You might not like Singapore's govrnment, but calling it "evil" is a bit of a
stretch. I don't think Singapore has ever had legal slavery, massacred its
indigenous population, or used weapons of mass destruction on foreign cities.
But hey, we can talk about it, right?

~~~
straight_talk
Did North Korea ever had legal slavery, massacred it's indigenous population
or used weapons of mass destruction on foreign cities?

~~~
laumars
Yes. Kim Jong-il had personal slaves. Plus thousands of North Koreans work to
death in concentration camps.

And comparing Singapore to North Korea is just absurd. You might as well just
reference the Nazi's and be done with Godwin's law
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law))

~~~
cbr
straight_talk isn't comparing Singapore to North Korea; they're arguing that
Tloewald's definition of evil is too strict because it wouldn't include North
Korea.

~~~
Tloewald
I'm not providing a definition of evil, i'm pointing out that Singapore's
achievements on the Evil Checklist don't measure up to the United States'. I
don't think the US is evil either, it sets a high bar for other contenders
though.

Take a look at the Roman Empire which, despite everything, made the lot of
ordinary people better.

North Korea probably meets my definition of evil, but I really don't know
enough. Nazi Germany, Stalin and his apparatus. Pol Pot.

Edit: among millions worldwide, I marched in protest against the massacre at
Tien an men square. My mother, who has far better cred in this area than I do
(having been imprisoned and tortured as a political prisoner) argued in favor
of the Chinese government — she said China wasn't ready for democracy and far
more people would suffer in a chaotic transition than if the government were
allowed to reform at its own pace. It's imponderabe — we can only try to do
what we think is right.

------
PhantomGremlin
Really, an article on censorship from "RT" aka Russia Today? According to
Wikipedia "funded by the federal budget of Russia".

I want to see an article from them critical of Putin, their dear leader. I
suspect that whoever wrote it would be lucky to escape alive to London. That's
a bit harsher than spending $39,500 for a license.

Reminds me of the old joke of many years ago. An American journalist and a
Soviet journalist are talking about press freedom. The American says something
like "America is great. We have freedom of the press. I can freely criticize
Richard Nixon and explain how bad and corrupt he is". The Soviet journalist
says something like "We have the same freedom. I can freely criticize Richard
Nixon and explain how bad and corrupt he is".

~~~
shakesbeard
> Really, an article on censorship from "RT" aka Russia Today? According to
> Wikipedia "funded by the federal budget of Russia".

What does that have to do with the story of the article? Either the story is
true or not, this has nothing to do with the source.

> I want to see an article from them critical of Putin, their dear leader. I
> suspect that whoever wrote it would be lucky to escape alive to London.
> That's a bit harsher than spending $39,500 for a license.

False dichotomy. Spending $40k to blog is pretty awful and is not rebutted by
something that's even more awful.

~~~
gngeal
That's not a false dichotomy. That's an appeal to worse problems.

~~~
vixen99
He didn't rebut it or claim to. He merely said "it's a bit harsher".

~~~
gngeal
That's precisely why I said that this is no false dichotomy here. False
dichotomy is something completely different. False dichotomies are things like
"if you're not with us, you're against us", or "The new research shows that
one part of the theory of evolution is wrong, therefore creationism is right".
There's nothing like this here; his was a simple statement of the form "X is
not bad, because Y is even worse". See the difference? False dichotomy means
(falsely) asserting that when you disprove the _factuality_ of one
alternative, only one other alternative remains and therefore it's
automatically true. (Whereas apeeal to worse problems is not about factual
truths but about the weights of problems to be solved.)

------
hackerboos
Is anybody surprised? This is Singapore where the authoritarian PAP has been
in power for decades.

------
manojlds
As an Indian citizen, the scariest thing about this is my government copying
from its Singaporean counterpart.

------
TomGullen
How on earth are they going to enforce this.

~~~
kintamanimatt
One blog at a time. It's not difficult to imagine there are a few government
people looking for unauthorized blogs, or the ability to report an
unauthorized blogger.

~~~
bofussing
Singapore was one of the earliest adopters of a national firewall (back in the
late 90s). I am sure this will be the primary tool in monitoring any 'misuse'
of the Internet by the powers that be. Bo

------
nivertech
Singapore make Russia's Putin regime look good ;)

------
spitx
Singapore has only recently relaxed (read: suspended) the imposition of
mandatory capital punishment for drug trafficking charges.

While Western governments and media have long criticized Singapore's draconian
laws and its low tolerance for all crime, it has to be said that the
prosperous city-state has been highly effective at warding off the ill effects
of lax criminal jurisprudence and enforcement that typify, with the exception
of an absurdly oil-rich Norway or two, almost all developed Western societies.

It pays to give our approach to crime and sentencing another look before we
blissfully laud ourselves for 'upholding' some imaginary ethos governing human
dignity at the cost of rampant societal maladies that continue to plague us,
while in reality, doing a sloppy job at both.

Case in point:

Number of deaths in Iraq over the period of 2003-11 : 4,422

Number of murders in Chicago,Ill. over the same period : 4,265

Source(s):

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNIT9Dn_Rjk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNIT9Dn_Rjk)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaDR2kLI0m0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaDR2kLI0m0)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_99LydvXqDk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_99LydvXqDk)

[https://www.osac.gov/Pages/ContentReportDetails.aspx?cid=138...](https://www.osac.gov/Pages/ContentReportDetails.aspx?cid=13850)

[http://hbo.vice.com/episode-nine/ep-9-seg-1](http://hbo.vice.com/episode-
nine/ep-9-seg-1)

~~~
tptacek
There is absolutely no way that the total death count in Iraq from 2003, at
the start of the US invasion, to 2011 is only 4,422. Bush's own estimate,
which was heavily sandbagged, was 30,000.

~~~
spitx
The graphic clearly refers to Americans killed in Iraq.

Source:

[http://hbo.vice.com/episode-
nine/ep-9-seg-1/infographic](http://hbo.vice.com/episode-
nine/ep-9-seg-1/infographic)

~~~
boomlinde
The graphic does, but your reference to it makes no such mention.

