Comment: Yeah, they are "conspiracy hoaxes" when someone exposes what the US is doing to stifle free speech, but when the UN tries to wrest control away from the CIA - which is spying on everybody via the internet - suddenly it is a "serious, ominous effort..."

Comment: As is usual in this crazy world of ours, serious issues get reduced down to slogans and talking points that obscure the complexity of the underlying reality. In the case of the Internet, we have a situation where the technology that enables the net grew out of the needs of the US military-industrial complex to have a communications network that would resist the threat of nuclear war. The solution was a network of nodes where data could be moved around via myriads routes. If one node was taken out, communication between the other nodes remain intact and secure.

This is a great step forward when the net became available to everyone because it permitted a quick and easy way for the grass roots to connect with one another. The growing anti-globalisation movement used the net to effective measure as it stood up against the plans of international capital to open the markets of the world. We are told, on the other hand, that it has permitted those evil villains at al Qaeda to hook up and organise their terrorist attacks.

The Powers That Be do not want the grass roots to have this type of political weapon: the ability to share information outside of the official channels and to organise responses. Our flash animation, Pentagon Strike, has been seen by half a billion people around the globe. It is not only China, Cuba, or Iran, the three countries named in the article, who wish to control the flow of information: all countries have the same interest. Often, the question comes down to one of means: is this censorship down openly, or is it down on the sly? IS it down by the outright banning of access to certain sites or types of information, or is it done by weighing search results and corporate filters justified through appeals to employees wasting their time at work surfing the net? The same result is achieved through the two approaches, yet the soft approach permits the culprit to accuse the first of heavy-handed censorship and anti-democratic oppression of its people.

The Internet is now a world-wide resource. In a perfect world, everyone would have a say in its management. Obviously, we live in a less-than-perfect world. Representative forms of democracy tend to obscure political control rather than guarantee it is in the hands of the governed.

It is normal that other countries wish to have a say. The level of trust one can put in the United States has plummeted in recent years with the innumerable lies that have come out of Washington. Although the US claims it is an arbiter of freedom of speech, wishing to protect the Internet, it is clear that this is a political stance it is using against those countries that use the hard methods of censorship. The US monitors all Internet traffic, from the content to the simple fact of who is in communication with whom. We would be naive to think otherwise.

Prognostications go from creating phoney bodies to give the appearance of input to multiple Internets to allow certain countries to more directly control the content. The upshot for the public is that no matter which side wins, or what kind of compromise is achieved, the Internet as we have known it will change to the detriment of freedom of speech and access to information.

The clampdown that is coming will be world-wide.

Comment: David Wolman is a left-handed writer in Portland, Oregon. His new book, A Left-Hand Turn Around the World: Chasing the mystery and meaning of all things southpaw, is published this week by Da Capo Press at £14.50/$23.95