Barking at shovels

The Internet, free speech, and al Jazeera

El Reg says what needs to be said:

It can be like this for TV and print media too, but Al Jazeera's satellite TV operations are to a great extent proof against such perils. The signals can't be stopped readily, unless you jam them, ban dishes or get them kicked out of their satellite deals, and you can't readily get to the company for as long as it has tolerant governments prepared to host it. That doesn't amount to complete invulnerability, because political and commercial pressures can still be exerted in order to quieten it down, but the position is a hell of a lot more favourable than is the case for the Internet. Think about the lengths you'd have to go to in order to produce a similar level of invulnerability via the Internet, and you'll maybe conclude that free speech is a lot less free than you thought.

Lay off al Jazeera, already.

update (2:15pm): Hm. Current state of http://english.aljazeera.net/ is that the article bodies don't display in Mozilla, and the page doesn't load at all from Internet Explorer. I don't know why IE can't get to it.

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