Net censorship. Is this true?

Question

There was a rumour going round years ago that a certain well known internet company, who shall remain nameless, once prevented a leading doctor from searching medical journals on cancer because it filtered out the word ‘breast’, thus temporarily preventing him from participating in research that would have affected All Our Lives?

Answer 1

I know of a hospital computer system which didn't allow searches that had the words 'penis' or 'vagina' till the doctors complained, they said it was their barring of 'naughty' words, and changed the system.

Answer 2

Net censorship. Yes this does indeed happen. On this forum we are using as I type and as you read, are censored.

Lets do an experiment:

Racial terms - though ugly and useless, prevent freedom of expression (one term used for each major race classification):
******
****
****
Cracker

Anatomy terms - as you said, makes research difficult:
Vagina
Penis
Breast
Testicles

(
to be perfectly honest, I am surprised by two things:
1.) the anatomical terms all passed
2.) the ugly racial terms were not all treated the same way
)

As far as net neutrality goes, that has nothing to do directly with censorship, but it does have an impact in saying that rather than all carriers going by the 'you handle my traffic and I'll handle your traffic" the idea is to make a land grab so to speak. You pay for your traffic. The effect would be that only those who can afford it get bandwidth. For instance, if Microsoft is paying for a a popular blog site, it stays up because they can afford it - or pass the cost to the consumer so we all pay for it. If an every day citizen is paying for a popular blog site it goes down because the citizen can't afford to pay for the bandwidth cost. Another way to put it is average joe is punished for not charging, average joe fan is punished for not paying - a way to make sure to push the idea that its wrong unless money is changing hands.

Net Neutrality would basically have the effect of changing the price model from a fix how much space you use kind of thing to a variable how much bandwidth do you use thing. That would essentially make it possible for large commercial interests to stay going while cutting out smaller competition and non-commercial interests. In a sense its censorship, but not in the free as in speech way; rather then free as in beer way - you have to pay for each listener.

Government loves it as another source of tax revenue and increased campaign donations for supporting it from big business . Big business loves it (generally) because it allows a new revenue stream out of thin air and/or raises the cost of entry into the information exchange system. For them it is another way to un-naturally limit competition.

Just take a look at who supports it and who doesn't - when big business likes something but the average joe doesn't, its probably good for big business and bad for the average joe right? Isn't this a country of people that are supposed to have equal voices regardless of race, gender, economic status?

That's why net neutrality is bad in my mind - it just has a really bad, easily foreseeable and obvious consequence - kind of creates the effect of the FCC without having to impose regulations nobody would stand for.

Answer 3

I tried to enter the word "***" on this site a couple of times,and I did not mean it in the term as used in the U.S.A. So I assume the same thing happened here. When I enter this I guess I`ll find out. In the UK it means cigarette
PS I have just added this because it did omit it again
Its the 6th 1st & 7th letter of the alphabet

Answer 4

Of course there is much censorship on the net.
Most of it is self regulating ,although im sure the establishment leans heavily on them.
The government is always looking for ways to censor the net as our last bastion of free speech.The first opportunity will come from public outrage to an event that appears to have spawned from the net.
Nothing this useful,educational and open to free speech could possibly last long.
{am I really this cynical}

Answer 5

The most common search engine in the world has a filter you can turn on which will filter out such words. But you can turn it off to get the net uncensored.

Answer 6

You mean Net Neutrality Yes and its Important for you to write to Congress.

Answer 7

Many Many so called reasons.

Answer 8

He made a right tit of himself