Another Terrible Idea From Russia: Using Whitelists To Control Access To The Internet
from the anything-they-won't-do? dept
Techdirt has been reporting on a steady stream of bad tech ideas coming out of Russia, including content monitoring, banning children from using WiFi, anti-piracy laws requiring takedowns in 24 hours and -- of course -- site blocking. But such blacklists are too permissive for some Russians: over on Google+, Peter Lemenkov pointed out that one region is now introducing whitelists (original in Russian):
In February the Safe Internet League is starting an experimental access to the "clean Internet" in one of Russia's regions. Users in the test region will only be able to access pages and sites that have been checked by the League's experts.
It's hard to know what's worst about this approach. Maybe the idea that there is such a thing as a "clean Internet", or that self-appointed experts have the right to decide what is clean and what isn't. Or perhaps just the belief that it is possible to create a whitelist that isn't utterly useless. According to the report above, the League hopes to have a million "resources" available to users at launch; meanwhile, in the real world, Google says it indexes 30 trillion Web pages....
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Filed Under: censorship, internet, russia, white lists
