IP filter to block gambling ?

[jetset]

The Italians did a complete about turn on their controversial ISP blocking initiative and the prohibitionary route some time ago.

By opting instead to adopt the regulatory approach, the Italians have built a lucrative and successful licensing jurisdiction for online gambling, albeit nationally restrictive as is the case in France (a model that seems to be increasingly the nation-by-nation trend in Europe).

There's a drive to harmonise European regulations at present but who knows how long that will take.

The Aussie government doesn't seem to heed its own commissions, taking political decisions rather than practical ones - for example the Productivity Commission recommended regulating online gambling, but the government have gone the other way...and the ISP/internet censorship component of their efforts has been widely condemned but appears to be stubbornly followed regardless.

I get the feeling the Norwegian government has the same sort of obdurate mentality...and it's trying to protect Norske Spil as well.

Government interference is imo screwing up the internet globally and steadily eroding the freedom and entrepreneurial spirit it used to epitomise. I guess it was too much to hope that they would keep their involvement at a minimum when there is this political control-freak element and national protectionism rampant everywhere.

[jstrike]

Government interference is imo screwing up the internet globally and steadily eroding the freedom and entrepreneurial spirit it used to epitomise. I guess it was too much to hope that they would keep their involvement at a minimum when there is this political control-freak element and national protectionism rampant everywhere.

Agreed. The trend isn't restricted to gaming. Look at Skype's situation, or the same thing with RIM. Governments from Dubai to the Home of the Brave are demanding they rewrite their software and rewire their networks to allow eavesdropping. Regulations that used to exist only in the strictest totalitarian regimes are increasingly meshing with the ad hoc patchwork in the rest of the world. You could almost say that rather than the Chinese internet opening up, the rest of the internet is slowly starting to resemble a balkanized version of many Chinese models.

All of this regulation puts a much heavier burden on startups in any internet sector, whether you're starting a casino or just trying to ship shoes from one state to another (let alone one country to another). Governments always wanted to tax and control the internet in their jurisdictions, but increasingly they've found the legal and technical tools with which to do it.

I think if it gets bad enough in the first-world countries where most internet users still reside, then something like Freenet, but more advanced, with massively distributed parallel processing on top of distributed storage, will arise. A system that's a P2P cloud where each user is also a processing node. But any kind of distributed overlay is by definition a lot slower than what we're used to, so its use only grows in inverse proportion to freedom on the open network. And so far, no one's done it. The closest thing was YouServ, but no one would have dreamed of using that for financial or privacy-sensitive transactions. Possibly no one's figured out how to solve the trust problem to make a processing network like that effective, safe and tamper-proof, which is why we're still relying on the client-server model where the servers have to live in some physical jurisdiction and the clients have to go through hoops to get there from another jurisdiction.

My prediction though is that this will pan itself out over the next ten years. The tighter the governments grip, the more savvy users will slip through their fingers.