For many years, governments took a hands-off approach to the Internet and the world witnessed technological innovations that were beyond our wildest dreams. From the creation of e-mail and the World Wide Web, to the browser wars of the '90s, to the creation of online payment systems, streaming video, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology, and the open source movement, a spirit of competition and innovation created the modern-day Internet. Likewise, personal web pages, blogs, and other technologies have given people around the world the ability to express themselves to a mass audience. The low barriers to entry that the technology provides created a marketplace of ideas that is unparallelled in any other communications medium and at any other point in history.

Yet, all this seems to have changed. Nowadays people portray Internet service providers as the big bad wolf, arguing that government must step in to save us from the multinational corporations. They say that government must spy on us to protect us from terrorism. That our ideas should be censored because they might offend someone else. They ignore that government is the one entity that can hold a gun to our heads and call it justice; the one entity that can take our money and call it charity; while companies operating in a competitive market have every incentive to provide people with what they want. At the same time, governments are introducing strict laws that prevent people from using the technology to its full potential. Laws that prevent us from sharing our lives and participating in our own culture.

It is now clear that the Wild West is gone and in its place we have something far more tame and much less free. The Internet, however, has become an indispensable tool in many of our lives. People rely on it for business, education, entertainment, and communication. The future of the Internet is, therefore, more important than ever. My new website Fencing the Digital Horizon: How Government Regulations Threaten Internet Freedom, produced as part of my masters thesis, explores the issues of copyright law and net neutrality in Canada from a free market perspective.

In my latest series of articles written for the Western Standard, I take a look two pieces of legislation that were introduced in the House of Commons before the summer recess. The proposed legislation would force Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to install costly monitoring equipment on their networks and give the government expanded powers to monitor its citizens Internet use.

In the first article, entitled Government of Canada moves to monitor Internet users, I look at what the legislation says and what it means to Canadians:

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is claiming that shortly after the group posted a video to YouTube exposing how the Canadian government paid an American artist to create a giant red ball for a Toronto arts festival, their entire YouTube channel was hit with a copyright violation from Business News Network and forced to shut down. Coincidence? Maybe.

While the YouTube channel is back online, I have taken the liberty of creating a backup of the video to help ensure it is not censored again:

Craigslist, a popular online classified ads site, announced yesterday that it will be removing the "erotic services" section for U.S. cities and replacing it with a new section that will be moderated by their staff:

Right of Identica is a group created to facilitate discussion among right-of-centre identi.ca users. It is an inclusive community, which welcomes discussion on right-wing, conservative, and libertarian topics of interest. It was created in the same vain as other similar communities on Twitter, such as Right of Twitter, Top Conservatives on Twitter, and Top Libertarians on Twitter. Since identi.ca offers much better support for groups than does Twitter, it is an ideal place to start such a community.

For those who don't know what identi.ca is, it is an open source micro-blogging service that is similar to Twitter. One of the big problems with Twitter, as I see it, is that it is a closed network. Unlike technologies such as the telephone or e-mail, Twitter is controlled by a single company. If they decide to change their end-user license, people are stuck. If they decide to change their API and not release it to the public, none of the software designed to inter-operate with Twitter will work. Likewise, no one is able to setup another instance of Twitter. While anyone can operate their own e-mail server, only Twitter can operate a Twitter server.

Luckily, Laconica is an open source Twitter replacement. There are a number of sites that currently run Laconica and they are able to communicate with one another. The largest of these sites is identi.ca, which has the ability to republish your notices on Twitter and Facebook, so your friends on all three networks can see what you're saying.

Micro-blogging sites, such as Twitter, seem to be all the rage these days. From Prime Minister Stephen Harper to my professor's cat, it seems as though everyone is twittering. The technology allows one to send out short (140 character) messages that are published on a website and broadcast to those within a person's social network. This can be done in a variety of ways, including using a computer or a cell phone's text messaging capabilities. It certainly has the potential to fundamentally alter the way in which we communicate, but how are people using the technology?

I signed up for a Twitter account last October and I was determined to figure out what all the fuss was about. One of the first things I did was sit down on election night and watch the stream of tweets posted to the #canadavotes hashtag. I still didn't get it. Many people were twittering the election results, but I could get the same information from the mainstream media and I was pretty sure that most Twitter users were just rebroadcasting the stuff they were seeing on television. So I tried insulting the Green Party, but not too many people took my bait. It didn't appear to be a forum for political debate, not to mention that the sheer volume of tweets flying by made it next to impossible to keep up with everything that was going on.