Italy vs. Internet, the impotence of reason against the ruling of indecency
The past weeks have marked an unparalleled escalation of the well known inadequacy and inability of the Italian institutions to deal with the Internet, to live their relation with digital technologies by following logic and rationality rather then emotionalism and violence. Conversely our “dear” rulers and members of Parliament have recently shot out a series of amendments, law drafts and opinions to make you goggle if you believe in the importance of Internet as a democratic tool.
Antipiracy masked as antipedophilia, censorship, government control, anonymity suppression, crimes of opinion, the proposals of “assault on the net” have literally “come out of the goddamn walls” to quote Aliens, repeated and conscious attempts to gag dissent, reduce freedom of expression, turn Internet into the nth media in the hands of Silvio Berlusconi and his courtiers after having reduced national television channels to muck and press to dung. Just trying to talk about it makes me retch and be irrational, though in the end I realize that it’s worth at least to outline a chronicle of the escalation, to use as a starting point to discuss the next bestialities that will surely come out from the most indecent and uncivil Italian Parliament and government ever existed.
So let’s start with the D’Alia amendment, proposed on February by minority senator Gianpiero D’Alia to modify the DDL n.733 with the aim to establish the definitive government control on the opinions expressed on-line. In the perverted vision of Internet Mr.D’Alia has anyone guilty of a crime of opinion, even if it’s just to protest against a law considered unfair, can be removed from the net with no permission or trial from the judicial power. The government becomes the unappealable judge of citizens’ on-line behaviour like it is in the dictatorial regimes, a form of control that if it had been applied it would have probably been envied by Chinese communists.
Luckily the bestiality of senator D’Alia has been recognised as such by his own colleagues that, gathered in the justice and constitutional affairs commission in the Chamber of Deputies, have finally revoked the amendment. But D’Alia is just one of the many, questionable figures crowding in this chronicle of horrors and dirt masked as Italian deputies: on February Luca Barbareschi, someone that after having tried to be an artist by killing live animals in Cannibal Holocaust has recycled himself as a deputy on duty for Silvio Berlusconi, has officially presented his proposal to normalize distribution of digital copyrighted contents.
With the involvement of Barbareschi also comes the solution to the “mystery” of the infamous SIAE proposal circulating during the establishment of the anti-piracy committee, because his law proposal faithfully reflects the draft previously credited to the aforementioned copyright organization, first and foremost when it grants control tasks to SIAE and talks about assigning “control powers to Government authorities and police Bodies to safeguard the respect of obligatory norms, public order and decency, including child protection, on network platforms“.
Clearly unqualified to talk about the things he talks about, Barbareschi doesn’t explain how the heck public decency and public order fit together with file sharing and digital delivery. However the deputy, a showman that gained power thanks to Berlusconi, states that his proposal should be a starting point to work “all together” to “regulate the connected world” that now would suffer from “an absolute legislative chaos” as for copyright, e-commerce and everything.
But the real masterpiece of the recent Internet-killing proposals is the one presented by Gabriella Carlucci, an ex-showgirl that like Barbareschi in her old years decided to put down roots into Parliament (obviously with Silvio Berlusconi) and that has designed no less than a law proposal to abolish anonymity for posting whatever kind of contents (textual, audio, audiovisual and others) by users. The law is called “Internet a place of freedoms, rights and duties”, Carlucci invokes it to fight pedophilia but the proposal has been redacted by Davide Rossi, president of the organization Unione Italiana Editoria Audiovisiva (Univideo or Italian Union of Audiovisual Publishing).
Other than the obvious lack of knowledge on how Internet really work (if police officials want to find someone on-line they only need to follow the traces of an IP address), the Carlucci-Rossi proposal proves in conclusion to be another lobbying attempt by the Italian multimedia industry on politics, rather garish and unsuccessful, to strengthen the opposing measures against free on-line circulation of digital contents. The Berlusconian politicians and Ministers don’t care of what Internet is at all, they simply want to “intervene” someway to stop the misuses as the Minister of Justice Angelino Alfano says he wants to do while answering to a student.
In reply to the dystopian Internet that politicians want to establish at any cost, Italian bloggers (with the histrionic Beppe Grillo ahead) have thought up the slogan “Free Blogger” and have given it an international resonance aided by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing. To say it all in the Italian Parliament there aren’t only the embarrassing puppets of the lobbies like Barbareschi and Carlucci, and in the chronicle of the barbaric horrors surfaced in these months there is even room for a proposal that deals with development rather than repression, broadband and open access instead of censorship and control.
Presented by senators of Democratic Party Vincenzo Vita and Luigi Vimercati, the proposal on network neutrality, free software and information society plans to set principles of net neutrality in the Italian legislation, to promote a renewed democratic participation by netizens and the use of free software in public institutions, to guarantee an equal access to network resources in all the country. Vita and Vimercati state that the Italian government is the only one that does not invest in innovation in a moment of severe economic crisis, while their draft is “an organic proposal for digital modernization of companies and public administration and for development of ways of democratic participation by citizens, to valorize on-line freedoms and new creative contents“.
And the anti-piracy committee, what has its fate been? It had to promote dialogue, hold auditions, publish data and ferry Italy beyond the Urbani law, in theory one of the toughest on unauthorized file sharing repression but that miserably failed the expected targets. After more than two months of essential inactivity the notorious committee leaded by Mauro Masi (that meanwhile has become president of RAI) has produced practically nothing but a documentation on the alleged piracy damages that is full of holes to say the least.
This is, at least for now, the chronicle of the attempts of Italian lobbies and their political servants to rip apart, one piece after another, the residual state of rights that is still in force in Italy by citing as excuse the fight against “piracy” of digital contents. Unfortunately this is only the first part of something that, I have no doubt about it, will become even worse in the next weeks: after a troubled course in Parliament France has finally approved the three strike law, also known as Sarkozy Doctrine or Hadopi law, basically giving the industry the right to judge the legality of French citizens’ actions on-line and crushing the fundamental right of Internet access under the ultimate ruling of copyright.
On May 6 the European Parliament has established that such fundamental right to access has the same importance of freedom of speech, but the French deputies (which evidently aren’t lesser than the Italian ones as for servility toward the multimedia lobbies) have broken it up anyway by stating that an administrative (and not judiciary) body must force providers to disconnect for an undefined period of time a user caught at downloading “illegal” contents for three times in a row. After France the next country to adopt the three strike law could be just Italy considering that according to the opinion of Gaetano Blandini, General Director for Cinema for the Minister of Cultural Assets and Activities, the Hadopi law is an effective solution to on-line “piracy”.
Related posts
- Italy is ready for its own three strike law
- The P2P psychodrama between The Pirate Bay and three strike law
- SIAE, a denial that does not deny anything
- Anti-piracy committee, incompetence always rules
- How RIAA and Silvio Berlusconi plan to ditch P2P
- The minister-downloader repudiates the anti-piracy committee
- The Pirate Bay vs. Italy, the worse is yet to come
- The Italian magistracy wants to delete The Pirate Bay from the Internet
- Italy, The Pirate Bay withstands the majors’ assault
- Italy? Not a country for (old) bloggers
Comments
2 Responses to “Italy vs. Internet, the impotence of reason against the ruling of indecency”
Leave a Reply
-
· Subscribe to Sir Arthur's Den ·
-
· © Some Rights Reserved ·
The exclusive contents of Sir Arthur's Den are distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License, and must be ascribed to Alfonso Maruccia as the sole owner of the related copyrights.
Berlusconi feels threatened.
For good reason.
The truth hurts
(shame, all that money used to buy up the media)
Browser
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042513 Ubuntu/8.04 (hardy) Firefox/3.0.10
Berlusconi feels threatened for sure, but simply because he controls “only” the traditional media, the ones he owns (newspapers, publishing companies, televisions and others) and the ones he controls with politics (RAI, the state TV broadcasting company).
Internet is still a free territory in Italy, hence you see these absurd figures (Barbareschi, Carlucci etc.) working for their boss to try to shut down the net….
Browser
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; it; rv:1.8.1.16) Gecko/20080702 Firefox/2.0.0.16