This Week in Online Tyranny
In April 2010, Curt Hopkins, from ReadWriteWeb, started a weekly series of reports summarizing recent attempts at controlling / censoring internet content by several governments. Looks like an interesting source for arguments on the pessimistic side of the debate.
A list of the articles published in this series can be retrieved from the "About Curt Hopkins" page of ReadWriteWeb.

The first article, on April 1, 2010, lists some related events in Morocco, Vietnam, Germany, China and Iran.

The most recent article (as of Jan 9, 2011), has stories about the Tunisia government being attacked by 4chan/Anonymous, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, California, Bolivia and China.

His predictions about how things will evolve in 2011 seem to put him on the "pessimistic" side (tyranny, control, Chinese model, etc):

"Filtering, harassment, arrest and torture of bloggers and other users of social media will increase exponentially. There has been a geometric increase in the last several years, but I believe this coming years will see every traditional tyranny fully embracing the Chinese model: technical, legal, social oppression online. Most democracies will more closely travel the trail earlier blazed by Australia, sacrificing civil rights to a make-believe safety. The U.S., followed by many European democracies, have been traumatized first by terrorist attacks, and now by Wikileaks, into clamping down, and are edging, however hesitantly by comparison, toward the Chinese model."

To which the optimists will probably reply that, although such a sad scenario may very well happen in 2011 (e.g., prosecution of Assange by the US, plus "we told you so" by China and Russia, other countries following suit), it is also likely that it will generate some healthy opposition and will not be viable in the long term.


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This Week in Online Tyranny
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