This Is What It Looks Like

Dear BDS sufferers, Moonbats, and Lefties of all stripes: you know that repression and loss of free speech you've paradoxically been bitching nonstop about for the last few years?

This is what it really looks like. From the Italian left, of course.

The Levi-Prodi law lays out that anyone with a blog or a website has to register it with the ROC, a register of the Communications Authority, produce certificates, pay a tax, even if they provide information without any intention to make money.

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the Levi-Prodi law obliges anyone who has a website or a blog to get a publishing company and to have a journalist who is on the register of professionals as the responsible director.

Even a teenage catblogger would have to pay a fee and have editorial oversight in order to post pictures of Signor Puffy.

The comments to that post are interesting:

if you read through the document, you see how often the document obsessively repeat "... the goal of the present proposal is to foster and encourage pluralism...": Now... you could say that if you want to encourage pluralism, then why to emit such a law in the very first place ?

Reminds me of The Fairness Doctrine, which was also enacted to promote a 'pluralism' of sorts.

Italian bloggers are of the opinion that this law has come about because internet communication has been too successful at rousing Italians against the corruption that endlessly plagues their country.

Though it pleases me to point out that this law originates from the center-left, the idea of shutting up private citizens has broad appeal in Italian government and no one of any party has spoken against it, AFAIK.

Meh. Doubt it will work, anyway. Besides the enforceability aspect, there's the fact that many bloggers don't have real lives. I shudder to think of the repercussions.

A million 35-year old men erupting from their mom's basements and hitting the unfamiliar outdoors en masse, with murder in their eyes.

Good luck with that, Italy.

Thanks to Man of Substance.

posted by Laura. at 12:08 PM

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