The rich have more stuff than the poor do. This has been true across time and space. People in the past used to have a lot less stuff than people do today, and people in the future will have much more than we do today. Think all the gizmos and gadgets we have and which people just a generation ago did not. On average, people today are richer compared to those of the past, and poorer compared to the people of the future. But even in today’s world, the rich have more stuff than the poor – which is trivially true. These observations are true not just about stuff but also about information.

Information is an interesting kind of stuff. It is the basis of knowledge, and therefore power. The more knowledge you have, the greater power you have. Therefore if you wish to control people, to have power over them, you have to restrict their knowledge, and to do that, you have to control their access to information. This is true today and it has been true since the history of civilization.

This is a universal phenomenon. In the olden days in India, shudras were not allowed access to the Vedas and other scriptures. It was not too long ago that in the US, slaves were forbidden to learn how to read and write. In modern day India, the government rules over the people and keeps the poor illiterate and uneducated – the better to control them. In fact, one of the primary causes of India’s poverty is that Indians are massively illiterate. India’s educational troubles are rooted in the Indian government’s control of the system and their steadfast refusal to allow the system freedom.

Friedrich Hayek, writing in 1944, put the matter thus: “. . .  the whole apparatus for spreading knowledge – the schools and the press, radio and motion picture – will be used exclusively to spread those views which, whether true or false, will strengthen the belief in the rightness of the decisions taken by the authority; and all information that might cause doubt or hesitation will be withheld. The probable effect on the people's loyalty to the system becomes the only criterion for deciding whether a particular piece of information is to be published or suppressed.”

That quote is from his book titled, “The Road to Serfdom.” India is rapidly progressing on the road to serfdom. We have been getting hints about it for a long time, but now it is becoming very hard to ignore them. Read this article at the Center for Internet & Society site, “Invisible Censorship: How the Government Censors Without Being Seen” (http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/invisible-censorship)

Excerpts:

Government Has Powers to Censor and Already Censors
Currently, the government can either block content by using section 69A of the Information Technology Act (which can be revealed using RTI), or it has to send requests to the Internet companies to get content removed.  Google has released statistics of government request for content removal as part of its Transparency Report.  While Mr. Sibal uses the examples of communally sensitive material as a reason to force censorship of the Internet, out of the 358 items requested to be removed from January 2011 to June 2011 from Google service by the Indian government (including state governments), only 8 were for hate speech and only 1 was for national security.  Instead, 255 items (71 per cent of all requests) were asked to be removed for 'government criticism'.  Google, despite the government in India not having the powers to ban government criticism due to the Constitution, complied in 51 per cent of all requests. That means they removed many instances of government criticism as well.

'Self-Regulation': Undetectable Censorship
Mr. Sibal's more recent efforts at forcing major Internet companies such as Indiatimes, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, to 'self-regulate' reveals a desire to gain ever greater powers to bypass the IT Act when censoring Internet content that is 'objectionable' (to the government).   Mr. Sibal also wants to avoid embarrassing statistics such as that revealed by Google's Transparency Report. He wants Internet companies to 'self-regulate' user-uploaded content, so that the government would never have to send these requests for removal in the first place, nor block sites officially using the IT Act.  If the government was indeed sincere about its motives, it would not be talking about 'transparency' and 'dialogue' only after it was exposed in the press that the Department of Information Technology was holding secret talks with Internet companies.  Given the clandestine manner in which it sought to bring about these new censorship measures, the motives of the government are suspect.  Yet, both Mr. Sibal and Mr. Sachin Pilot have been insisting that the government has no plans of Internet censorship, and Mr. Pilot has made that statement officially in the Lok Sabha.  This, thus seems to be an instance of censoring without censorship.

Backdoor Censorship through Copyright Act
Further, since the government cannot bring about censorship laws in a straightforward manner, they are trying to do so surreptitiously, through the back door.  Mr. Sibal's latest proposed amendment to the Copyright Act, which is before the Rajya Sabha right now, has a provision called section 52(1)(c) by which anyone can send a notice complaining about infringement of his copyright.  The Internet company will have to remove the content immediately without question, even if the notice is false or malicious.  The sender of false or malicious notices is not penalized. But the Internet company will be penalized if it doesn't remove the content that has been complained about.  The complaint need not even be shown to be true before the content is removed.  Indeed, anyone can complain about any content, without even having to show that they own the rights to that content.  The government seems to be keen to have the power to remove content from the Internet without following any 'due process' or fair procedure.  Indeed, it not only wants to give itself this power, but it is keen on giving all individuals this power.

It's ultimate effect will be the death of the Internet as we know it.  Bid adieu to it while there is still time.

It is time for us to stop in our tracks, take a good hard look at where we are headed, and turn back. We change our destination – and our destiny – we have to change the government we have. Indians need to wake up and through out the corrupt bunch of the UPA as soon as possible.

It is all karma, neh?

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