Nice wishes from the west of the world! But… One subtle thing the world can learn from this is that democracy is about confronting, confronting all those incurable diseases with whatever you have in your artillery. In all western democracies, the present practice allows few influential lobbyists to make all the decisions of the state, whereas the rest of the people are just "consumers". Even if participating personally in political affairs is not possible when population is big, the present practice still deserves some big yell! /Sari On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 11:54 PM, Richard Forno <rforno@infowarrior.org>wrote:
The Internet Society on Egypt’s Internet shutdown
We are following the current events in Egypt with concern as it appears that all incoming and outgoing Internet traffic has been disrupted. The Internet Society believes that the Internet is a global medium that fundamentally supports opportunity, empowerment, knowledge, growth, and freedom and that these values should never be taken away from individuals.
The Internet Society considers this recent action by the Egyptian government to block Internet traffic to be an inappropriate response to a political crisis. It is a very serious decision for a government to block all Internet access in its country, and a serious intrusion into its citizens’ basic rights to communicate. If the blockage continues, it will have a very detrimental impact on Egypt’s economy and society. Ultimately, the Egyptian people and nation are the ones that will suffer, while the rest of the world will be worse off with the loss of Egyptian voices on the net.
However we are most concerned about the safety and security of the Egyptian people. Alongside the rest of the world, we share the hope for a positive and lasting solution to the problems that have risen to the surface there.
In the longer term, we are sure that the world will learn a lesson from this very unfortunate example, and come to understand that cutting off a nation’s access to the Internet only serves to fuel dissent and does not address the underlying causes of dissatisfaction.
http://isoc.org/wp/newsletter/?p=3091 _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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