A couple of unrelated articles caught my eye a bit today and led me to wonder just how unrelated they really where, or rather to ponder the impact of both of them coming to pass.
Old Holborn highlighted the NUJ calling for state support for the vital democratic work of “proper” journalists. Rather than deal with their work not generally being worth much they like us all to be taxed and then given vouchers to give to “proper” news outlets. I figure this actually has a reasonable chance of getting implemented in some form, as it’s a neat way for the state to give journalists a bung and make them more dependent on the state. Exposed politicians expenses? That’s not the sort of thing a “proper” news outlet does, no more vouchers for you. The Journalists would be quite happy as the direct link between vouchers and payment probably wouldn’t last that long (due to the huge amount not being used) and once that link was broken they could sit back and publish state and corporate puff pieces whilst collecting their democracy dividend. The benefit for the state is obvious, even more control over a sometimes awkward press and of course more bureaucracy which would have to be paid for.
Meanwhile over in the US they’ve a new bill to give them the same sort of rights to block websites as our very own digital economy act does. Just like our version this allows “copyright holders” or at least large companies (as you can bet they won’t enforce any of it for content stolen from individuals by the MSM) to have domains pulled and ISPs forced to block any site which share “protected content”. I imagine wikileaks may somehow fall foul of that sooner or later. Of course as so much of the internet is still based in the US, the US aren’t stopping at just blocking sites nope, if you’re upsetting American copyright holders and have a top level domain (.com, .org etc.) then they’ll just freeze your domain. Even if what you’re doing isn’t illegal where you are.
So on the one hand you’ve got the mainstream media, asking for the state to support them out of taxes rather than compete against independent content/news providers, whilst at the same time the state is taking ever more draconian steps to remove anyone from the internet that upsets their MSM pals. Now putting on my best tin foil hat, and allowing for the fact that neither the state nor the MSM seem to be able to grasp the (currently) cheap cost of entry for on line publishing and the power of distributed systems, it does look rather like a concerted effort to stop the internet being an effective tool of the people. Once more they’re trying to shove the genie back into the bottle and regain the control of information that both the state and MSM have lost.
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