The Twilight of the Internet in Czechia
The Twilight of the Internet in Czechia
Access to this server has been refused due to the Lottery Law 202/1990 Sb. (Čl. VII §2a).
No, it is not true today. Today it is just a very real threat of what can happen sooner that we think. The reason is the Lottery Law that forces to perform Internet censorship. The Internet Service Provider will be forced to block not only online casinos but also any advertisement of them. We will demonstrate that it is impossible to be done.
Suppose a law forbidding use of indecent words in phone calls. All phone calls will have to be monitored and indecent words beeped out. There are just a few phone operators thus it must somehow be possible. However, voice analysis is a complex task as well as the lexical one. It is difficult for a machine to understand intended meaning of word balls. Monitoring will have to be done by a human. Of course, no one will ever be able to do any phone call because he or she will try and wait till a human beeper is available.
It will be even more difficult in the case of internet. The routers and switches do most work in hardware, that's why they are fast. Censorship will require software support, the throughput will therefore be at least one order of magnitude decreased. Pages with online casinos cannot be easily recognised. Advertisement recognition is even worse. The page without advertisement may contain in a few miliseconds later and the advertisement may disappear after a few more miliseconds. The advertisement may of course be presented as an image. If a censorship machine could be constructed, it would have to perform image analysis that may take tens of minutes for each larger picture. Afterwards lexical analysis will be necessary. Analysis of a web page with many pictures may thus take tens of hours. This job will have to be repeated by each router. During such an analysis the router will be too busy and all remaining network traffic will be silently sent to a trash. A man will thus click a link and with good luck the page will be displayed a few weeks later.
Information may travel over the network encrypted and a censor cannot look inside. Ban on encryption will bring about an end of internet banking because everybody will be able to catch login information to any bank account. Privacy could not be preserved because everybody will be able to obtain login information for access to any database holding private data. Data boxes will have no sense because everybody will be able to manipulate with any data box in any way.
The internet service providers will then be forced to select one of the two following choices:
This law, as written now, violates rudely citizens' freedom. It is in contradiction to a state system that can assert that human rights are honoured.
If such a law is adopted, a great many network services will be probably closed. A great many scientific and research projects requiring network technology will have to be discontinued. This will also apply to projects paid by the EU funds. In any way the Czech Republic is going to have a right let-down as never before. I do not want to think about political and economical consequences.
This will happen if populist stupidity wins over common sense.
Links (in Czech):
I am forced to sponsor musicians and other copyright organisations by all my work because I store my stories, poems, photos as well as software and data on CD and DVD media.