The Internet and Academic Freedom

Michael H. Posner, author of The Internet and Academic Freedom, published in Science magazine in July of 2012, writes “…Internet Freedom is threatened across the globe.” His views relay the message that, more frequently governments are trying to censor the information accessible to the citizens of their respective countries, and that this repression of information will ultimately handicap the scientific and academic communities. In fact, Posner presents a statistic from the OpenNet Initiative that states “…47% of the Internet’s users live in countries that block legitimate content.” Posner has placed the responsibility of maintaining Internet Freedom on the shoulders of the government, the private sector and society in general.
Personally, I feel that Posner is looking at this the wrong way. He has stated that there is censorship and that countries are cutting their citizens off from “Internet Freedom” when, if you stand back and look at the industrial, technological, biological, immunological, etc. developments of the world, you realize that, even with censorship in place, Homo sapiens have come a long way. Each country, based on its own history, has a government that, ideally, should have the capacity to determine what vulnerabilities their countries possess; with that in mind, each country should put in place guidelines for internet use. Ultimately, each aspect of the country does come into play. For example, if a high school chemistry class is learning how to create an A-bomb, and all of a sudden there is an increase in online searches for “how to make an A-bomb”,