What the Future Looks Like

Creepy greedy corporations are winning the war. They have bought all the politicians and what you get is something like the following:

Italy's insane Internet law prompts removal of Italian Wikipedia

By Cory Doctorow at 4:21 am Wednesday, Oct 5

Prompted by Italy's punitive (batshit) wiretapping law proposal, Wikipedia has removed its Italian version and now directs anyone trying to find Italian Wikipedia to a page explaining that Italy's Internet law will make it impossible to have an Italian Wikipedia:

This proposal, which the Italian Parliament is currently debating, provides, among other things, a requirement to all websites to publish, within 48 hours of the request and without any comment, a correction of any content that the applicant deems detrimental to his/her image.

Unfortunately, the law does not require an evaluation of the claim by an impartial third judge - the opinion of the person allegedly injured is all that is required, in order to impose such correction to any website.

Hence, anyone who feels offended by any content published on a blog, an online newspaper and, most likely, even on Wikipedia can directly request to publish a "corrected" version, aimed to contradict and disprove the allegedly harmful contents, regardless of the truthfulness of the information deemed as offensive, and its sources...

The obligation to publish on our site the correction as is, provided by the named paragraph 29, without even the right to discuss and verify the claim, is an unacceptable restriction of the freedom and independence of Wikipedia, to the point of distorting the principles on which the Free Encyclopedia is based and this would bring to a paralysis of the "horizontal" method of access and editing, putting - in fact - an end to its existence as we have known until today.

My understanding is that Bill Gates has recently bought up all the rights to oxygen and is planning to implement a per-breath access fee. If you want to breathe, you will have to pay because he owns "the rights". Oh, and Apple is tired of waiting for people's eyeballs to wander over their various iEverything devices, so they have bought the copyright to all the world's languages. If you don't want to be illiterate, you will need to license from Apple the right to read. Any peek at a letter or word will cost you!