Censorship Bullshit

The whole world is currently discussing the problem that journalists reporting from the Olympic Games only have access to a subset of the whole internet: The chinese government is censoring internet traffic and reporters don't have access to a lot of pages with political content, for example sites about human rights or about tibet.

The media appears to be shocked and angry about this. Basically they write that this is evil. Bad chinese government! Internet censorship is bad! And evil!

But what those journalists and media don't mention is that it's not different in the countries from where they are. Political internet censorship is common even here in western Europe. For example: ever tried to access a Nazi website from Austria or Germany? Although I don't have any sympathy for Nazis, it's still simple political censorship. It is also still pretty common for western governments to try to take down even foreign websites with so-called copyright infringing, pornographic, violent, war-mongering, racist, fascist or anti-semitic content. A bit understandable from the viewpoint of our culture, but freedom of speech certainly looks different. The today published EU Global Online Freedom Act where the European Union plans to restrict trade with internet censoring countries seems like a bad joke seen from this angle.

The only real difference to the great firewall of China is that we are censoring OTHER types of websites. [And that China is doing this a bit more effectively ;)] If you want free, uncensored internet, how about starting to make it work in our own country first?