So far in the Internet, there aren’t too many restrictions on our freedom of speech; we can say what we want to say online, and we generally won’t be punished for what we post or even what we browse. Recently, however, there has been more pressure to integrate censorship and content regulation into the Internet to control what we can do online. In order to determine to what extent online regulation is acceptable, if at all, we need to consider what the Internet really is and what basic rights that we have online. In its simplest form, the Internet is just a huge conglomeration of networks that people can access from their devices. As a client, the middle-man that provides us access to the wide range of services on the Internet is our Internet Service Provider, or ISP. Few years ago, there was a law that was passed to enforce fair access for everyone, which is the ISP’s responsibility. After Trump’s election, however, it was revoked so that the ISP had freedom to control the traffic, such as throttling and creating fast lanes. While the ISPs currently may not be abusing their freedom, too much deregulation of the government could allow the ISPs to become extremely powerful and completely control the Internet, which would be an inconvenience for both tech companies as well as the consumers. Therefore, there should be some sort of regulation by the government to ensure that not all the power is transferred over to the gatekeepers of the Internet. Going back to the idea of content regulation and restriction, there should also be some kind of regulation on that. Some content are indisputably inappropriate or disrespectful and have no reason to be discussed or browsed on the Internet. As discussed in class, it may be necessary for people to be aware of such topics, but they shouldn’t actively participate in them. In order to make the Internet safer and acceptable to all audiences, there should be a combination of regulation and an effort on the user to not participate in sensitive or inappropriate areas of the Internet. Then, the question is, who gets to decide what content is regulated on the Internet? There are two primary agents that could be involved: the government and private companies. In my opinion, the private companies should be the one deciding what content should or should not be regulated on the Internet. If the government gets to decide, then not everyone would agree with their definition of what content should be regulated or censored. On the other hand, leaving up to the private companies means that if their consumers don’t agree with the regulations and censorship implemented by a specific company, the consumer can just avoid using the company’s service and look for another one. Ultimately, I am not too worried about the online censorship problem because the topics that advocates of censorship are supporting are primarily inappropriate or disrespectful ones, which I did not want to participate in anyway, let alone explore the contents. So even if some agent decides to enact online censorship, I would be fine with it as long as the content that is being censored is backed by some justification in which its presence is unnecessary on the Internet.
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