Well, I had a nice rebuttal planned, but Firefox just crapped out on me, so I will try again.
First off, knock it off with the condescension, you are clearly getting testy with me for no other reason than I am questioning your statements. If you had read the entirety of my post, I was the one saying that the Internet is anarchy, and that it relies on it. You were the one in your OP who said that it was not until forces tried to dictate it. I also never said that the chaos caused by the Internet's anarchy is a bad thing, I have been merely been trying to state that with some foresight, policing it for children and blocking sites would have been far easier than the current methods of search and destroy being used by blocking programs now. You seem awfully antsy with me, and I'm not really sure why.
I will give you your statement that there are a lot of people trying to tell others what do to on the Internet, but when placed within its context, the amount of information and rights that are suppressed is quite minor in terms of its overall impact; to deny this is really quite laughable. If you had any of my posts on this board on the subject, you would know that I am a huge proponent of individual rights on the Internet. However, I know as well as anyone that like in real life, personal responsibility has to play a hand in our actions there as well. We cannot expect individual rights and then hide behind a cloak of secrecy and anonymity when it is deemed convenient. When you consider the number of sites that promote hate, incest, rape, abuse, racism, violence and everything else that go without incident, while at the same time this country bans cigarette ads from magazines in an effort to reduce the taint on the nation's youth, you can see the parallels between society and online society don't even come close to matching up. Further to the point, though there has been numerous pieces of legislation worldwide to try and stop the flow of downloading, they have been proven to be futile at best, and a grand total of zero cases have been ruled on in an American or Canadian court (with the exception of the pre-trial extortion tactics of the RIAA and MPAA). Downloading occurs at a far more frequent pace, and bootlegging in monsterous volume has become second nature in developing countries - a new study showed that fewer than 300 copies of Windows Vista have been
sold in China since its release, a country with more than a billion people. Like it or not, we (and especially we as Canadians) can do almost whatever we want on the Internet without fear of criminal or civil suits; why you are bitter about those trying to "tell us what to do" is not only cryptic but petty.
Oh, and caution to the wind actually means to do something,
regardless of the risks involved, not to act recklessly. And irregardless is a non-standard word, a deviation of 'regardless' that is meant for impact. I have a BA in English, so you can get off your high horse and knock off the lectures. Frankly though, if you've been reduced to whiny rhetoric and trying to (vainly) police my grammar, your argument as a whole (what little there is of it) comes across as being pretty weak; for someone who is arguing that the Internet is wrongfully full of people trying to tell others what to say and do, you sure come off as hypocritical.