Japanese Government to Censor Internet

Waterproof cellular phones

Another sad state of affairs. This actually quite surprised me. Cell phones are ubiquitous and all forms of communication are very important to the Japanese. I doubt the public is going to look on this favorably.

With little fanfare from local or foreign media, the Japanese government made major moves this month toward legislating extensive regulation over online communication and information exchange within its national borders. In a series of little-publicized meetings attracting minimal mainstream coverage, two distinct government ministries, that of Internal Affairs and Communications (Somusho) and that of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (Monbukagakusho), pushed ahead with regulation in three major areas of online communication: web content, mobile phone access, and file sharing.

On December 6th, in a final report compiled by a study group under the Somusho following up on an interim report drafted earlier this year, the government set down plans to regulate online content through unification of existing laws such as the Broadcast Law and the Telecommunications Business Law [1,2]. The planned regulation targets all web content, including online variants of traditional media such as newspaper articles and television broadcasting, while additionally going as far as to cover user-generated content such as blogs and webpages under the vaguely-defined category of gopen communicationh [3,4,5,6].

I'm not liking this precedent.

NOTE: You must go to Gayaku for the footnotes which are,unfortunately, mostly in Japanese.

Via Black Listed News.