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Not Your Father’s Censorship

Not Your Father’s Censorship, Quasi-monopolies and wary governments curb Web freedoms, by HARRY LEWIS, The Chronicle of Higher Education: “The Chronicle Review”, Volume 55, Issue 19, Page B9. [subscription required, but freely available here for a short time]

Now, with almost everything digitized, new communication technologies have led to a global proliferation of censorship agents, methods, and rationales….

Should we feel comfortable relying almost exclusively on private companies to help us find the truth, when we cannot know what version of the truth they are showing us?…

Storing information and making it available are now service businesses, and therein lies another censorship opportunity….

U.S. copyright law is such a heavy club that it can abet censorship by parties that simply object to what people are saying about them….

Harry Lewis is a professor of computer science at Harvard University and a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He is a co-author of Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion (Addison-Wesley, 2008).

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


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