Hungary leads EU attacks on press freedom, watchdog says.

Though, a funny line from the article,

‘Asked by a reporter in Brussels on Monday if Hungarian journalists who criticize its EU presidency will be punished, Hungarian foreign minister Janos Martonyi said: “I would encourage all of you to violently criticise the Hungarian presidency if you are unhappy with it.”‘

I wonder how willing they would be to stand by this statement were anyone to actually undertake some violent criticism.

The Venezuelan parliament has passed a law that bans any internet content that “promotes social unrest, challenges authority or condones crime.”

A United Nations task force formed last week said it was considering the creation of a new inter-governmental working group to help further international cooperation on policies to police the Internet.

The discussion was undertaken to “enhance” and extend the work of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), a UN-sponsored organization that makes recommendations on how governments should deal with the Internet. The IGF’s mandate is due to expire soon, so members of the UN’s Commission on Science and Technology for Development Bureau took up the issue and formed a task force to determine what the new IGF should look like.

At the task force’s meeting on Tuesday, delegates for China, Brazil, India, South Africa, Serbia and Saudi Arabia said they supported the government-only plan, with some saying they hoped it would further proliferation of broadband services in poorer nations. Brazil specifically insisted it should not be seen as a “takeover” of the Internet.

“The beauty of the Internet is that it’s not controlled by any one group,” a post to Google’s official blog began. “Its governance is bottoms-up—with academics, non-profits, companies and governments all working to improve this technological wonder of the modern world. This model has not only made the Internet very open—a testbed for innovation by anyone, anywhere—it’s also prevented vested interests from taking control.”
They added that the proposed format of the next IGF was “incompatible” with a July resolution by the UN’s Economic and Social Council, which required the Commission on Science and Technology for Development to form a working group made up of states and “all other stakeholders.”

tl;dr: the UN wants to steal the internet.

Read the article that I shamelessly stole these paragraphs from here:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/plans-panel-governments-set-policies-policing-internet/

Also consider taking part in this clicktivism. (But bear in mind that the petition is essentially asking for Google to be let in on the circlejerk, so ye might not be cool with signing that.)

All internet porn will be blocked to protect children, under UK government plan

The Electronic Frontier Foundation rounded up the responses of several human rights groups to the attempts to suppress wikileaks, worth a read.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/human-rights-organizations-freedom-expression

• Amnesty International ~ “Freedom of expression is an internationally recognized human right that limits the power of the state to prohibit the receipt and publication of information. The burden is on the state to demonstrate that any restriction is both necessary and proportionate, and does not jeopardize the right to freedom of expression itself.”

• Human Rights First ~ “This issue transcends the particulars of the Wikileaks case. No matter what you think of Julian Assange, anyone who cares about Internet freedom should be concerned that in its zeal to cripple Wikileaks, governments and companies are taking steps in this case that pose a threat to fundamental rights.”