A Quote by John Gilmour

The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

John Gilmour

Quote Topics

Around Censorship Damage Internet Routes

Quote Author

John Gilmour
Scottish - Politician
May 27, 1876 - March 30, 1940

There's a popular saying that the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Desire and innovation will trump policy, the argument goes, as clever programmers circumvent controls.

Virginia Postrel

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

John Gilmore

People were touchingly naive at the dawn of the Internet revolution when they said the Internet will route around censorship the way it routes around damage. With any revolution, the establishment catches up and figures out how to screw it up. The answer is to keep technology advancing fast enough so that those who would try to control it can't. It's up to people to defend what they care about. We shouldn't be complacent that this stuff is going to be a force for good.

Paul Saffo

The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it.

John Perry Barlow

Equally, the Internet interprets attempts at proprietary control as threats and mobilizes to defeat them.

Eric S. Raymond

If you have an internet service provider that's capable of slowing down other sites, or putting other sites out of business, or favoring their own friends and affiliates and customers who can pay for fast lanes, that's a horrible infringement on free speech. It's censorship by media monopolies. It's tragic: here we have a technology, the internet, that's capable really of being the town square of democracy, paved with broadband bricks, and we are letting it be taken over by a few gatekeepers. This is a first amendment issue; it's free speech versus corporate censorship.

Michael Copps

I have a very specific definition of censorship. Censorship must be done by the government or it's not censorship.

Penn Jillette

Overall there may be less censorship in America than in China, but censorship and self-censorship are not only from political pressure, but also pressures from other places in a society.

Yiyun Li

Poetry interprets in two ways: it interprets by expressing, with magical felicity, the physiognomy and movements of the outward world; and it interprets by expressing, with inspired conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man's moral and spiritual nature. In other words, poetry is interpretative both by having natural magic in it, and by having moral profundity.

Matthew Arnold

Some people suggest that a worldview is like a set of glasses that color the way you see the world around you. A Christian interprets the world one way, and an atheist interprets the same world a completely different way since he's looking through different worldview "glasses."

Greg Koukl

Even with censorship, the Internet is a force for change.

Peter Singer

China is the most repressive censorship regime on the Internet.

John Palfrey

Chinese central government doesn't need to even lead public opinion: it just selectively stops censorship. In other words, just as censorship is a political tool, so is the absence of censorship.