The BBC reported this weekend that Italian bloggers are protesting a proposed law, the Alfano decree, which would put heavy restrictions on the rights of bloggers, and could possibly have EU-wide implications if put into action. Bloggers in Italy staged a one-day strike in July and demonstrators have held both online and street demonstrations against the proposed law. 

Attempts to restrict Italian bloggers is not such a new phenomenon under the regime of Italy’s Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, himself a media baron Out-Law.com reported on it all a while ago, and it’s been well discussed elsewhere.

Investigative journalist Marco Lillo sees Italy’s bloggers as vital for freedom of speech: “The fact is these bloggers and the internet are the only escape valve for this information that is free from the control of the big industrial groups who own the newspapers.

‘They have commercial interests and often have to obtain authorisation and concessions from the government. This means the web is the only place where the editor or journalist is independent. The blogger is his own man.’ ” — BBC

Italian bloggers strike for a day to protest proposed law that would fine them if they were accused of publishing defamatory statements. (Fulvio Paolocci/GlobalPost)

Italian bloggers strike for a day to protest proposed law that would fine them if they were accused of publishing defamatory statements. (Fulvio Paolocci/GlobalPost)

The Beeb quotes Alessandro Gilioli, a journalist who organized the blogging strike. He says it is a sure gateway to self-censorship: “They are discouraging the use of the internet, forcing all the bloggers to rectify any opinion that anybody thinks is hurting his honour or reputation and they are creating big fines, more than €10,000 (£8,500), if you don’t publish your rectification in two days. … So that means that if a teenager stays two days away from the computer and he doesn’t rectify his opinion, he is going to pay €10,000. … That’s stupid and that’s incredible and overall that’s discouraging people to use the internet.”

According to a news item at Global Post, “About 200 bloggers gathered at sunset in the picturesque Piazza Navona July 15, while hundreds others joined the protest online by freezing blog posts for a day.”

At CPB we aren’t sure of the value of a blogger strike, that actually stops people from publishing online. The net result (pun partially intended) is that the topic loses attention online. Search engines don’t see that people are purposefully not talking, they just that they’ve stopped and thus other news rises to the top. Possibly a more appropriate campaign would be a nationwide concerted effort to all blog on the same topic and thus make it the most likely search result for people looking up censorship. Come up with a the same set of tags to use, etc.

As poetic as a strike may seem, the result is that there’s been an online silence on the topic. And that’s a void that Mr. Berlusconi, with his own sizable media control, isn’t going to be too put out about filling.

The Son of Geek Talk blog is already putting the Alfano decree to the test:

Summer is a slow news period. This may explain the outrage over the proposed Alfano decree – if passed, critics say, it could kill free speech on the Internet. Italian bloggers even organized a “strike” (is there anything funnier that blog posts  – erratic by design – not being posted in a certain day?) to preserve whatever spaces of free expression are still available.

In Italy.

Now, I need to understand this. Governments are busily trying to affirm the territoriality of something that is IMHO not territorial in the classical sense. I’m italian, but this blog is written in english and hosted on WordPress.com which is, I believe, an american corporation. Does that mean I will be subjected to this law and forced to issue a correcting statement if someone objects to something I write? Let me do a small experiment:

mr. Alfano is a lackey to mr. Berlusconi who is a crook.

This statement is clearly derogatory to the honour and reputations of messrs. Alfano and Berlusconi. Now waiting for the cease-and-desist letter.