"Contenidos, Censura y Privacidad en Internet" (English Abstract)

Daniel Collico Savio


Thanks to DRS

for his assistance in this translation.


1 - The information is an extremely delicate question. The Web, almost synonymous with Internet at the moment, provides abundant information about almost everything. Figure 1 shows this situation: before other technological innovations man has had more time to modify his conduct on the matter. The same does not happen with Internet, which has arrived very quickly at fifty million users, while other inventions have reunited only after decades.

2 - These new developments constitute a preoccupation for the class leader, who exerting a sort of technocracy, tries to determine if these expressions -say, web pages- are valid, if they are income-producing in the middle of normative and technological swings. Paradoxicalally, these innovations are not known for the enormous majority of the society. Therefore the naive atmosphere of the first years of Internet should be left behind, in order to get into unexplored future areas.

3 - When we speak about Internet, many images come up to mind. But main ideas are diversity, multiplicity and variety. Internet has no restrictions, and has been the natural vehicle for many forms of expression; although it may sound strange, the very structure of the networks reflecs the authoritarian or democratic intention of those who have designed them. The centralized and military criterion that characterized Internet in its beginnings, has developed -through a necessary topological change- to an anarchical and decentralized structure, valid for the aims of creation and impossible to censure.

4 - This thesis tries to respond - at least in a first attempt - certain questions.

  1. Does censorship in Internet make any sense, or is it only a new technological fundamentalism?
  2. Are there any technological tools to preserve ceratin social groups from being exposed to contents they are not prepared to receive?
  3. Who defines these questions without adopting a messianic slant?
  4. Is there any natural form to extend the rights to cyberspace?
  5. Is it OK to legislate in countries, when Internet is global?

5 - As a bottom line to these questions, this work does not intend to be considered as a sort of Internet behaviour ruler. However, the individual aspect of freedom needs not hamper the existence of an ethic protecting defenseless individuals from violent or excessive contents; it should be taken into consideration, non the less, that the exhibitor of violent pornography in Internet - to mention an example- is finally an individual, who can be subject to sanction.

Return to Thesis                                                                                                                                                      Nedstat Counter