On Wed, 28 Sep 2005 23:26:59 PDT, Tony Li said:
Are there national exceptions to international law? Seems to me that if no exceptions are permitted, then everyone is treated equally.
This is discussed in passing in RFC3675. In particular, the third paragraph paragraph of section 3: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Northern Nigeria, and China are not likely to have the same liberal views as, say, the Netherlands or Denmark. Saudi Arabia and China, like some other nations, extensively filter their Internet connection and have created government agencies to protect their society from web sites that officials view as immoral. If everybody is treated equally, then if one of those countries objects to a site, then you can't visit it *either*, even if your country feels the site is acceptable. So, for instance, you couldn't visit the link http://aclu.org/pizza (a real URL about a real problem), because there's at least one government that wishes that URL would go away. Two, if you count the Chinese, who probably don't want their people knowing what rights people in other countries have...