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EU sees bloggers as a threat

BRUSSELS, September 5, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The European Union has issued a document recommending that some means be found to regulate and identify bloggers...

... "They don't seem to like blogs or even understand the concept of blogging, do they?" Dale wrote about EU bureaucrats. "We all know that 'voluntary' soon becomes 'compulsory'. My label is the title of my blog. That is quite sufficient, and I don't need some faceless Eurocrat to tell me otherwise."

Daniel Hannan, a blogger and writer for the Daily Telegraph, warned that the EU has been trying to get regulatory control over bloggers for some time. "Eurocrats instinctively dislike spontaneous activity. To them, 'unregulated' is almost synonymous with 'illegal'. The bureaucratic mindset demands uniformity, licensing, order."

"Eurocrats are especially upset," he continued, "because many bloggers, being of an anarchic disposition, are anti-Brussels. In the French, Dutch and Irish referendums, the MSM were uniformly pro-treaty, whereas internet activity was overwhelmingly sceptical."

When Hannan first saw, in June, a report on the efforts of the EU to "clarify the status" of blogs, he dismissed it. Hannan says, "Not even the European Parliament, I thought, would actually try to censor the internet. I was wrong."

In June, the principal drafter of the Committee's report, Estonian Socialist Marianne Mikko, said that bloggers "are in position...to considerably pollute cyberspace." She said that there is a growing amount of "misinformation and malicious intent in cyberspace" and that it is in the public's interest to have "a quality mark, a disclosure of who is really writing and why."
Read the entire article, it's chilling.

Related Link: EU Seeks Legal Means to Shut Up Eurosceptic Bloggers ~ Lifesite News

Comments

  1. I've been beating this drum for over a year now. Bloggers seem to think they're somehow immune to state censorship and control when the record of almost all governments and bureaucracies would seem to indicate otherwise.
    Blogger responses will take one of two forms, they'll either knuckle under and comply with the directives or they'll defy the regulators and blog on regardless. And the regulators will then pick a few high-profile bloggers and make an example of them.
    The achilles heel, of course, is ISPs--control those and a government controls bloggers.So we can expect this government to follow the European example and place the onus for regulating blog content on the ISPs.
    Uncle Helen isn't going to tolerate free speech during her fourth term, if she gets a fourth term.

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  2. Can I expect to blog from a secure cave away from the bent authorities in the future? Didn't Europe give us big brother technology!!

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