Completely off-base. The US has, by longstanding tradition, had a more expansive attitude towards free speech than Europe. Consider blasphemy laws in the UK, which were only abolished in 2008 but would never have been constitutional in the US. Consider laws against Holocaust denial or displaying Nazi symbols in continental Europe that would be unconstitutional in the US. In Germany you can be arrested for displaying a swastika. In the United States, the courts (in National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie) allowed a Nazi group to march through a neighborhood populated largely by Jewish Holocaust survivors. None of these have to do with controlling networks. They have to do with the first amendment and with both jurisprudence and attitudes towards freedom of speech that are different in the US than in many other countries.
> The US has, by longstanding tradition, had a more expansive attitude towards free speech than Europe...Consider laws against Holocaust denial or displaying Nazi symbols in continental Europe that would be unconstitutional in the US. In Germany you can be arrested for displaying a swastika.
These laws were included in the German constitution following the "denazification" of Germany by the USA, where Nazi symbols were banned and literature burned.
The laws against Holocaust denial and Nazi symbols were pretty much forced by the USA. It's extremely ironic how often they're mentioned as an illustration of the USA's devotion to free speech.
Maybe. In practice, however, even in the US there are and there have been censorship instruments, from the FCC all the way to Sen. McCarthy and Hoover. Today, US military personnel and civil servants are "protected" from wikileaks material by blocks at the network level. Federal pornography filters have been proposed several times, and on occasions it looked like they would become a reality. The US Constitution might be more benevolent than average on freedom of expression, but it doesn't mention TCP/IP anywhere.
