Licensing Access to The Web Proposed at The Davos Economic Forum

If some people have their way you may need a license to access the web in the same way you need a license to drive a car. Such draconian restrictions would put the government in charge of your web access, destroy anonymity, and allow for an easy back door censuring of dissenting voices by simply revoking the license if they granted you one in the first place. Such a plan was deemed to repressive even for the Chinese censors when a similar plan was proposed.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100025849/control-freaks-want-web-licences-to-end-bloggers-anonymity-be-very-afraid (via)

"The American blogosphere is going increasingly “viral” about a proposal advanced at the recent meeting of the Davos Economic Forum by Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, that an equivalent of a “driver’s licence” should be introduced for access to the web. This totalitarian call has been backed by articles and blogs in Time magazine and the New York Times.

As bloggers have not been slow to point out, the system being proposed is very similar to one that the government of Red China reluctantly abandoned as too repressive. It was inevitable that, sooner or later, the usual unholy alliance of government totalitarians and big business would attempt to end the democratic free-for-all that is the blogosphere. The United Nations is showing similar interest in moving to eliminate free speech."