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Net Neutrality is dying in Japanese cellphone ISPs

Link: 「あまりに急」「検閲では」――携帯フィルタリングに事業者から不満続出 (1/2) - ITmedia News.

未成年者は携帯フィルタリングに原則加入――昨年末、総務省の突然の要請が、携帯コンテンツ業界に波紋を広げている。未成年者は市場のけん引役。「一律フィルタリングでは健全なサイトも見られなくなる」「検閲に近い」などと、事業者側は不満を募らせる。

Net Neutrality is one of the hottest topic here in the States, and there's a strong reaction against the ISPs shutting down p2p traffic etc. and FCC started an investigation on these ISPs like Comcast.

In Japan ... Net Neutrality already is about to die in just a month, at least if you surf the net with cellphones. In the last December, Ministry of Internal Communications (総務省) "requested" Japanese major cellphone ISPs (NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and SoftBank, which makes 99.9% share of the market) to "force" URL blocking if the subscribers are minors, i.e. under 18 years old. The subscriber can opt-out the filtering if they and their parents agree to, but it's on by default.

The list of blocked sites are maintained by the company called Net Star and those three ISPs all use the same blacklist. Net Star is just a private company and the goverment is trying to filter the internet for underage users based on this list. WTF?

These days it seems Japan is trying to become China in terms of internet control.

Japan: Running Dating websites would require certificates? WTF?

Link: 出会い系事業者に対して届け出を義務付けへ、警察庁の研究会が提言.

National Police Agency of Japan is considering to submit a law to require precertification to run "Online dating sites". The reason behind this is that it's currently hard to figure out the organization behind the sites when the criminal activities occur (like prostitution of the minors), especially when the servers are placed in foreign countries.

This approach is ALL WRONG.

One, Even if you require precertification to run this in Japan, it'll still be unnecessary if you have servers outside Japan and this law wouldn't give any benefit. Two, the organization to give certificates will be a private sector, and who can trust these organizations? Three, the definition of "online dating sites" is so vague that any sites that has a social networking aspect or web-messaging functionality would need to do this.

By doing this, all internet community sites would require bullshit process to keep the site up, or just simply move their servers outside Japan, which is a loss to the nation itself.

Stop making an effort to control internet. It's useless.