Bloggers beware !

World over governments are waking up to the power and disruptive impact of blogging -

China Digital Times quoting NYT:

In its latest measure to tighten policing of the Internet, China has begun requiring bloggers and owners of personal Web sites to register with the government or be forced offline.

Read on the legal mailing list I subscribe to:

Austrian government is coming out with a law to bring down anonymity on several media sites.  Now every website needs to have  an "impressum" - which will provide name and venue of the media site.

Whereas India is planning a  sophisticated way of keeping track of all blogger-journalists:

We are framing the rules for giving accreditation to dotcom journalists

It's hard to trust government bodies and bureaucracy on matters of free expression. Knowing all the evolving/available tools on both sides - hiding your identity (anonymizers, proxy etc)  and finding out the sites geo-location  etc (geo-location services, keyhole etc)  its futile to even attempt all these measures in the first place. Good things in life have their own self-organizing model.

My note to government policy makers, manage violations using modified read on the legal and intellectual property  principles but stay out of the growth curve of this new media.  Don't try to manage it. It's decentralized at it's very foundation.

Update: Darren Barefoot reports  similar controls coming up in Canada.