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Does the UK Really Think it Can Police the Internet?
The Online Harms White Paper could be a threat to free speech
A school playground in England, 1997. I am 12 years old. I am walking towards the entrance where my mother is waiting to drive me home. I am giddy with excitement during the journey back. Tonight is the night that I’m finally going to get it.
I barely look up as I eat my dinner, shoveling it into my mouth as quickly as I possibly can. As soon as the knife and fork hit the empty plate, I’m rushing upstairs to the computer. I sit in front of the glow of the Windows 95 boot screen until the familiar start-up sound plays. A few clicks later, I’m listening to the screeching and hissing of the modem as I connect to the Internet.
“Welcome to AOL,” Joanna Lumley chirps.
I fire up a program which I spent most of the previous Sunday downloading. It’s a newsreader: an application that connects to Usenet, a distributed discussion system. I press the “Connect” button. I navigate to alt.engr.explosives, where yesterday somebody asked the question as to where they could find The Anarchist’s Cookbook, a fabled, possibly banned, tome of all sorts of forbidden knowledge. Last night’s reply was a pointer to an File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server, of which I copy the IP address, username and…
