Should we regulate the internet?

This would be a huge attack on free speech. Many people don't have freedom from their partner or their employer or their community to speak freely. Any authentication model like this would vastly reduce the ability of vulnerable people to use the internet to get and release information.

what is it with ppl in this country looking to be chastised and thrown into a canvas bag like a snake and told what they can and cannot do. i really despair. P1ss off with your rules.

for example, how about parents take control and responsibility for their kids devices , how they use them, what content they are looking at, or video games they play for example. i know of three families , girls & boys of varying ages from 10 - 17 yrs and their parents monitor their phones, tablets , wifi goes off at 830pm in the house, and devices are off. no harm in it and the kids accept it and sleep soundly. Where's the problem in this?

And you only have to look how brainwashed irish adults here are alone , let alone kids, and any bullsh1t internet kik-kok craze comes , or trend comes about and they follow like sheep, same with Instaspam and their "influencers" , give me a break.

ppl seem to have lost their way bigtime, just because many do it, dont make it necessarily so does it because you seen it on the internet.

There are advantages to social media for sports , hobbies etc is great, but you dont live your life by them 24/7, but most do. Ppl will forgo social situations to be sucked into some stupid video thats doing the rounds or some influencer who boiled and egg that morning.

So more to the Left than SF (which is now a centrist party)? What you are proposing is simultaneously extreme Right and extreme Left in that both positions on the spectrum, when they gain power, depend on controlling people. It isn't a socially liberal stance at all.

Regards...jmcc

First of all, its not just children I would be worried about. Its adults, and anyone gullible and vulnerable. Some of the stuff I have seen my parents and work colleagues believe is beyond comprehension.

Remember there was a bird of prey over Leinster a few years ago? Someone in work told me to keep my dogs (35kg labradors, I can barely pick them up myself) inside because the bird, which I think was a hawk, could swoop down and take them. Dont be so daft I said, they couldnt pick a labrador up to which I was told it had already picked up a cow from a farm and flown away with it. Baffling.

I have no IT training but years ago I installed a proxy server because our IT manager banned a load of websites in work so we could use facebook (pre smartphones)

Youtube (google) think I live in Turkey, Netflix think I live in Argentina so I get these services for almost free whatever the costs are in those countries. I learned these on boards

My whole family use my netflix account, my Gfs son uses my disney in his house despite it being disallowed.

My spotify family are not my family and dont live with me

If I can do all these things, and I am only doing it out of divilment not because I have to, how are they going to stop people that really really really want to access content and post stuff

Its impossible

I've been to China. How did I get around the government controlled Great Firewall of China? A VPN.

What happens when international ISPs like Starlink tell you to feck off?

I think it a time ever comes where I've to log into mygovID.ie to access websites I'll be giving up the internet!

Cuba gTLDs:

349

Locally hosted websites: 58

Externally hosted websites: 46

North Korea gTDs 2

Myanmar:

gTLDs: 255.

Locally hosted websites: 79

Externally hosted websites: 99

Turkey might be a big surprise for you.

gTLDs: 1,624,780

Locally hosted websites: 1,122,022

Externally hosted websites: 110,151

North Korean style control might be a dream of extremists but it would result in dead censors. Take away Internet access and a lot of people will get very angry. Apart from not understanding the technological realities of what your are proposing, you don't seem to have thought about its consequences.

Regards...jmcc

It is not. The reason is because the people in the EU bureaucracy who would try to implement it are, not to put too fine a point on it, technologically clueless. These are the same type of people responsible for the .EU fiasco and GDPR. They make the Internet less safe because they are incompetent.

These are the people who wanted every DNS to be considered critical infrastructure with contact details available in a hypothetical database for the operator of every DNS. Almost every broadband router has its own DNS and is therefore, under some interpretations of NIS2, critical infrastructure. One example I heard of the other day was that a homeowner with solar cells on the roof is considered the operator of critical infrastructure because there was a connection to the national electricty grid.

At an EU Q&A on NIS2, I asked if they had quantified the number of DNSes that are covered by NIS2. They hadn't. They hadn't a clue. You may trust such people but I don't. There was a proposed amendment (a very good one) to clarify the situation on DNSes and infrastructure but it was rejected. This is the problem with legislation that applies to technologically complex problems. There are rarely any simple solutions and simple solutions only appeal to people who don't understand the problems.

A few years ago, the National Library tried to crawl Irish websites. Simple enough, right? It isn't. First they didn't know the size of the Irish webscape and they had people who had no expertise trying to solve this problem. The company that won the contract for the crawl was the company that runs Archive.org (The Internet Archive). It detects websites by following links in pages. Now, this is a a problem because an "Irish" website may have links to a non-Irish website and the set of links becomes much larger than the set of candidate websites. Then there's the problem of compromised websites were links to drugs websites and worse are injected into the site's database. They may not appear when a human vistor loads a website but search engine crawlers will detect and follow them.

What happens if one of your "approved" websites links to a website that is not "approved"? Congratulations, you've just broken the Internet for people.

Regards...jmcc

Until one or two of the thousands of sites start tracking some extra information, and holding onto that information a little bit longer than they should - and the lads over at mygov.ie have the information to link your real identity to your social media usage?

Like I said, anonymity is essential for free speech.

"I'm not really taking it away.......I'm only taking away 99.9999999% of it away".

Listen to the rubbish you're spouting, here. This is a complete and total authoritarian solution which will do sweet feck all to counter the problems that you're trying to address. Socially liberal my left nut, you're proposing a dictator's wet dream, the complete antithesis of a liberal ideology.

So, tell us, under your 100k sites proposal, how do you protect kids from this happening in the future?

You block the site that hosts it? What if it's posted to multiple sites? You block them all? So, all of a sudden you're down to 99k sites and everything that can possibly host videos or gifs is now blocked, including Boards, Facebook, instagram, twitter, snapchat, youtube, whatsapp, tiktok, telegram, pinterest, reddit, linkedIn, discord, twitch, tumblr, etc.

That's probably 75%+ of Irish internet traffic gone overnight. This is like using a nuke to kill a cockroach, it honestly looks like you proposed this as a solution and, faced with the glaring impracticality of it all, you're digging in instead of admitting that it is a) unworkable, b) unsuitable, c)impossible to implement and d) a completely inappropriate reaction in the first place.

What you're proposing is taking the responsibility off of parents and making the Internet a far less free place. So I would have been a teen in the early 2000s and I totally saw plenty that I shouldn't have. I equally frequented websites that taught the fundamentals of hacking. Honestly, my parents had very little knowledge of my online activities.

Many of the entirely legitimate websites that I used could easily be interpreted as bad or even dangerous. However in spite of largely unmoderated access to the Internet, I largely turned out fine. I'm an experienced software engineer as a result of it.

There are parts of the Internet that need to be regulated to some extent and I say that in terms of data mining, disinformation by foreign regimes and just overall privacy. Standard laws on illegal material should apply also. However proposing outright draconian rules to prevent general online access to the vast majority of the Internet? It's incredibly dangerous and anyone with half a brain will work out how to bypass it if they want.

And it's parental responsibility to have some idea of what children or teens are doing online. Using set lists of acceptable websites is regressive and would absolutely be abused. On top of that, it would by default block entirely acceptable websites.

And you think blocking websites will prevent access to adult content and such? There's a myriad of ways to share content outside of websites. There's p2p protocols, file transfer protocols and plenty of other ways to transfer data. Block a website and there's a dozen ways to achieve the same result. Are ips in general gonna require whitelisting cause that would not work... Your concept would not only regress the Internet but it would be pretty impossible to achieve.

China hasn't managed to achieve it as there are numerous ways to bypass it. You cited North Korea but in general, only high ranking officials have access. The rest of the country is on the intranet at most.

Outside of your idea being draconian, it shows an obliviousness to online infrastructure and how networking works. Websites are only a portion of the Internet. On top of that, parents do have a plethora of ways to manage their teens internet use, many teens will work out how to bypass them but they will too if the EU attempted to block every website.

Have you ever built a web directory? Basically, what you are describing is a web directory of links that have been approved by you or someone else. The problem is that website content changes. Domain names are deleted and reregistered. After a while, your whitelist will become stale and filled with problematic links.

Even a small list of 100K takes considerable work to keep it maintained. And you still haven't explained who will do this work and who will approve these websites. There are approximately 220 million gTLD domain names. I track them from registation to deletion using rather large databases. I also track the IP addresses of their websites and where these websites are located. On yout hypothetical list you could expect to see about 1.3% domain names being deleted per month. The deletion rates for domain names with developed websites are somewhat better but your 100K list needs to be continually updated and have new links added.

Automation is only good for a few things and this is not one of them because the approval process is manual and that does not scale well. Yahoo tried to do it in the 1990s when the web was much smaller. Eircom tried to do it with its Doras directory. Even Dmoz tried it at a global level. They were all successful for a while but when the management wasn't looking, the Web changed. Search engines replaced them.

Regards...jmcc

It's up to parents to monitor their kids internet browsing , even if the web did not exist theirs plenty of r rated movies on tv if you have cable tv the UK government wanted to bring in a law any adult who wanted to visit porn websites would have to setup an online ID it's up to parents to bring up their kids to be responsible if Trump gets elected we will probably see more laws about regulating internet content maybe no one under the age of 15 should be given a smartphone the average teen probably knows more about vpn hacks than their parents the French government did a study on age verification it says there's no system at the moment that can do this without putting people's privacy at risk eg hacker might be able to access the private data users name address etc