2debate

Stand up for your rights

It cost around $30,000 for one semi-famous tech guy to make himself “disappear” from anyone looking for him. His 15-step solution is probably not even foolproof. What’s more, he could achieve that in the US. Would it be possible to do the same in countries like, say, Russia or China? It’s very doubtful, considering the extent to which those countries are increasingly controlling (their side of) the Internet.

Are we therefore heading towards an ever more controlled Internet or is the free Internet still very much alive, at least in parts of the world still considered to be “free”? Even the European Union has been discussing – and is close to voting on – a series of regulations (in particular the so-called articles 11 and 13) which on the surface appear to be severely restricting what we could be doing on the Internet.

It’s a tricky question that you may perhaps not be sensitive to just yet – but what if you are no longer to upload or watch the content you like? Will it be enough, as Sebastian claims, to be running your own Internet server from your garage or to be using workarounds to access an unrestricted Internet, something which even the most hunted-down terrorist groups have more or less been able to do? Even if that were possible, the ironic twist of accessing an Internet with unrestricted freedom of expression is that it would probably require to shell out even more money to be able to access it via a VPN… (or even to understand what that means).

By the flip of a coin, Dirk will defend tooth and nail the motion that the free Internet is a chimera, that it’s already dead. On the other side, Sebastian will try to show that thinking “it was better before” makes little sense, and that if anything, we can very much share and access whatever we want today. Tune in to listen to our latest published episode – and more, as we inevitably continued the discussion beyond our allocated time for the debate!

And yes, 2debate will always remain free: we won’t charge you ever AND we will always talk about any topic we feel like addressing… assuming there is something like free will of course, but that’s for another debate :).

Sebastian & Dirk

Picture: CC0, Pixabay