ONE month ago, the controversial FPB amendment bill was passed by South Africa's Parliament. It came as a major blow to online content providers battling prior restraint and other apartheid-era laws from a previous period of newsroom censorship, a...
Tag: Internet
Stop the draconian Cybercrime Bill
IN OCTOBER of 2015, I warned readers of the many dangers inherent to the deeply flawed and draconian Cybercrime Bill, Medialternatives was one of the first publications in the country to break the story, followed by an opinion piece written by myself and published by the Cape Times, I therefore f...
How Internet rights were included in our constitution
IT WAS in 1995 that I returned from self-imposed exile and America’s West Coast. Having launched what would be the very first online act of mass civil disobedience against John Major’s Criminal Justice Bill the previous year. The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against Whitehall were...
Worknet, Sangonet & the struggle for digital freedom
FROM two floppy disks smuggled into South Africa in the late 1980s, to an NGO which continues to play a major role in responding to the Information Technology (IT) requirements of the NGO sector in South Africa, this is the unique story of SANGONeT. In the late 1980s, not long after Bill Gates ha...
Taxing the Internet, Gordhan’s regressive proposals
IT'S BEEN a long time coming, the new tax proposals mooted by government could end up doing more damage to Internet access than any censorship laws. In his latest budget speech, Pravin Gordhan outlined a plan whereby " foreign businesses which sell e-books, music and other digital goods and servi...
South Africa’s digital isolation finally at an end?
South Africa only got television in 1976 thanks to apartheid and the National Party. This pattern of late-adoption of technology was repeated again under a socialist government when the ANC imposed similar tactics of isolation. Instead of unbundling Telkom, the national cable company created by t...