At least we express ourselves, even if no one listens.

An opinion piece published yesterday celebrates victories to keep the internet free of government interference in India. Section 66A was a legislation passed by the Congress in 2008 which made causing annoyance or inconvenience a criminal offence, punishable by up to 3 years in prison. This was struck down by the Supreme Court. The present BJP government intended to bring a national encryption policy in which ordinary people would have to preserve Viber, Facebook and WhatsApp chats for 90 days, presumably for the police to see if necessary. That has been withdrawn after an enormous outcry, as was the intention to blackout 857 porn sites. The Gujarat government, also BJP, banned the internet twice to contain public anger during the Patel agitation to be included into OBC category. India is not alone. Turkey blocked the internet this year and China has a Great Firewall permanently to block internet content considered unsuitable by the Communist Party. Our government regularly asks Google to delete content, of which Google complied with about 61%. What is really noteworthy is that there were few requests to remove hate speech and impersonation, real crimes, but most were for defamation and other reasons. Politicians do not like the truth, about themselves. " The Jasmine Revolution in the Middle-East and India Against Corruption (IAC) would have been half as successful without the mobilising capacity of social media. Many people today wonder if the Jasmine Revolution and IAC achieved anything truly transformative. But no one questions the transformative force of the internet. It is this energy that some governments will most definitely try to calibrate and control," writes the author. Maybe because they do not have the money to spy on everyone as the National Security Agency in the US has been doing for years. But is the internet a really useful protection for the people, apart from watching porn, or just an enormous cacophonous chamber where 7 billion people are screaming their own opinions? Politicians will try to block criticism without mentioning the internet. Maharashtra issued a notice to the police to charge people with sedition if they criticised politicians and many who wanted information under the RTI Act have been killed. Bayes' Theorem explains why people use the same set of figures to arrive at completely opposite conclusions. This makes rational discussion impossible as opposing groups will shout the other down. However, this may have negative value. Nazism would not be possible in today's Germany because there will be millions of opposing voices to Hitler on the internet. That is why there is no internet in North Korea and China controls it so strictly. At least it gives a voice to the powerless.