“The [Inter]Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” — John Gilmore, 1993
“Now there's no question China has been trying to crack down on the Internet. Good luck! That's sort of like trying to nail jello to the wall.” — Bill Clinton, 2000
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" -- John Gilmore.
Even back in the slashdot days I always thought this oft-repeated quote was more of a hopeful rallying cry than an actual statement of fact. And I think it's been clear for at least ten years that it's definitely not true.
>People who uses these new entry points into the Net may be in for a shock. Unlike the family-oriented commercial services, which censor messages they find offensive, the Internet imposes no restrictions. Anybody can start a discussion on any topic and say anything. There have been sporadic attempts by local network managers to crack down on the raunchier discussion groups, but as Internet pioneer John Gilmore puts it, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
>"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
>This was quoted in Time Magazine's December 6, 1993 article "First Nation in Cyberspace", by Philip Elmer-DeWitt. It's been reprinted hundreds or thousands of times since then, including the NY Times on January 15, 1996, Scientific American of October 2000, and CACM 39(7):13.
>In its original form, it meant that the Usenet software (which moves messages around in discussion newsgroups) was resistant to censorship because, if a node drops certain messages because it doesn't like their subject, the messages find their way past that node anyway by some other route. This is also a reference to the packet-routing protocols that the Internet uses to direct packets around any broken wires or fiber connections or routers. (They don't redirect around selective censorship, but they do recover if an entire node is shut down to censor it.)
>The meaning of the phrase has grown through the years. Internet users have proven it time after time, by personally and publicly replicating information that is threatened with destruction or censorship. If you now consider the Net to be not only the wires and machines, but the people and their social structures who use the machines, it is more true than ever.
>"We make free software affordable."
>This is the slogan on the back of the first Cygnus Support T-shirt.
The quote is still quite valid when applied to the culture of the Internet, however. People create tools ranging the gamut from Tor to MafiaaFire to circumvent and prevent censorship from occurring, even with systems that are anything like robust.
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." - John Gilmore
This turned out to be more wishful thinking and less law of nature. Net traffic now seems to readily route itself into walled gardens crowded with gnomes demanding ever stricter speech controls.
Back in the early days, people used to say "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". That may have even been true back then. Definitely not true any more, at least not of the internet as we know it.
"The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." — John Gilmore
It's a moral imperative to resist digital totalitarianism in all forms. Parents need to "think of the children", not the government. The government also doesn't need to first to invade everyone's privacy as a tool to extract payment on behalf of a few megacorps.
PS/TL;DR: Italy has a vibrant torrent culture. Probably not Hetzner, but I hope there's a VPN torrent box as a service to help people avoid this stupid and dangerous censorship.
John Gilmore's oft quoted in these cases: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." When, if ever, will politicians learn this? Will it take a generation that has grown up on the Internet and watched this to make them realize these actions are pretty futile?
Whenever I see news like this I think of John Gilmore's quote, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." Perhaps decisions like this will hasten a move toward a decentralized and an encrypted Net where politicians and their corporate sponsors have far less influence.
“Now there's no question China has been trying to crack down on the Internet. Good luck! That's sort of like trying to nail jello to the wall.” — Bill Clinton, 2000
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