During the "Internet Governance Forum" last month I wrote that we need to leave the internet alone if we want to foster human rights, instead of governments trying to regulate it and using it as yet another stick with which to beat non-compliant governments with bad records on human rights. I said that the internet was a tool of democracy and human rights because clever public spirited people like the folk behind "anon@penet.fi" many years ago would invent things that allowed people to express themselves and get information without censorship.

And so, only a few weeks later, it's nice to hear about...

BBC NEWS | Technology | Web censorship 'bypass' unveiled:

There is growing concern about web censorship

A tool has been created capable of circumventing government censorship of the web, according to researchers.

The free program has been constructed to let citizens of countries with restricted web access retrieve and display web pages from anywhere.

Interestingly, if there had been strong regulation of goings on out here in the internet, the sort of peer-to-peer sharing techniques that are being used in this little censorship getaround would probably have never been invented. They are the techniques that were once created to allow sharing of copyrighted material or even computer malware. A case, if ever there was one, I'd say, of two wrongs combining to make a right after all.

In other news today comes the idea that bloggers need some kind of "voluntary code" of conduct...

BBC NEWS | Politics | Voluntary code for blogs 'needed':

The flow of content "should not be regulated by any government"

Blogs and other internet sites should be covered by a voluntary code of practice similar to that for newspapers in the UK, a conference has been told.

Press Complaints Commission director Tim Toulmin said he opposed government regulation of the internet, saying it should a place "in which views bloom".

But unless there was a voluntary code of conduct there would be no form of redress for people angered at content.

Nonsense. The article goes on to say that Technorati estimate that every day 10,000 new blogs are created and 1.3 million articles produced. Which means that in total I keep an eye on just about two per cent of just one day's increase in the number of blogs. There's your code of conduct right there - I will read those that interest me or make sense and discard the rest, even if I ever find them. I find them by recommendation from others or through searching for specific things and then assessing on the basis of recent postings how useful they will be to me.

Besides, for years, complainants have actually had the upper hand - it's relatively easy to get a website taken down even now because ISPs are scared of action against them that they will happily censor whole sites rather than investigate the veracity of complaints against them. The fact that we now have these social sites and large blogging platforms that will probably have more backbone and stand up to such complaints is evening that out a little.