[TheOtherHobbes]

Which is of course the problem. While some people are complaining about "technically incompetent" comments the political reality is that one of the primary motivations for the original Internet was a tool for avoiding government censorship.

The phrase used to be "The Internet perceives censorship as damage and routes around it." Now it seems any censorship is fine as long as it's nationalist enough. And if by a quirk of history the US happens to control the domains with the widest reach - well, so it goes, never mind, and let's wave a flag.

The inevitable outcome will be a Balkanised Internet, with each sphere of influence monitoring and controlling its local content.

This has happened formally in China and Russia (and elsewhere) and has been happening informally in the US and EU.

Perhaps the requirements of realpolitik justify this - and perhaps they don't. It's not a simple question with a simple answer.

So it's a debate worth having - not on the basis of TLD ownership, but on the basis of international civics and the ever-decreasing free movement of information which is not corporate or government-controlled, online and elsewhere, in all spheres of interest.

[sippingjippers]

> The Internet perceives censorship as damage and routes around it

Gosh, it's genuinely shocking I haven't heard that phrase in a long time.