In Italy Online Free Speech is in Danger
Perhaps the next time that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will look for an example of "threats to the free flow of information," she won't speak about "China, Tunisia, and Uzbekistan".
Perhaps the next time U.S. Secretary of State will speak about a nation where "bloggers and activists were detained," she won't speak about Egypt.
Perhaps the next time, she will speak about Italy.
Soon or later, the Italian parliament will discuss an Executive Order of the Government about wire-tapping that includes a rule headed to any website. According to this bill before Italian parliament, anyone who runs a website, any blogger like me too, "will be obliged to arrange for a rectification of any information published online, within 48 hours from the request, although the request is groundless. In the absence of timely correction, the penalty will be a fine up to 12.000 euros."
This new bill endangers free speech and is a threat to Italian democracy.
But this isn't the first attempt of the Italian Government to stifle free speech. In 2010, they intended to "make Internet service providers (ISPs), and hosting sites such as Blogspot and YouTube, liable for content in the same way a television station is. In the strictest interpretation of the law, the sites and ISPs would have to monitor all content on their sites, content which is uploaded by millions of individual users (…) Authority for Communications Guarantees president Corrado Calabrò has said that Italy would be unique in the West as imposing Internet restrictions until now only imposed by authoritarian governments." What you have just read is a cable from Wikileaks.
Why all this? Again from the Wikileaks' cable: "Advocates of Internet freedom have repeatedly warned us that Italy's traditional elites — on both sides of the political spectrum — are very uncomfortable with the Internet's ability to bypass the traditional media that they control."
Help Italians blogger to defend free of speech in Italy using the hashtag #leggebavaglio or #noleggebavaglio on twitter.
Photo from zimbio.com and freeitalianpress.org
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