What The Witcher 2 Means For Censorship

Edge has put online an article discussing GOG’s recent move away from Geo-IP to determine users’ regions, how that may help Australian users circumvent censorship and get the original, unaltered version of The Witcher 2, and its possible significance on the long run. Here’s a snippet:

“The flat nature of the Internet means that it is virtually impossible to censor information by domestic region,” GOG head of PR & marketing Trevor Longino told us when we asked what the distributor’s actions could mean for online censorship. “Whether you’re talking about the Great Firewall of China or Great Internet Barrier of Australia, there are four simple measures to circumvent these that I know of off the top of my head. I’m sure that there are many other ways around them that a serious student of technology knows.

(I don’t think it’s a question of ‘are digital distribution systems circumventing domestic censorship,’ but rather, ‘does the internet allow people to circumvent domestic censorship?’ The answer to that is an unequivocal yes, and as quickly as governments can come up with new ways to enforce censorship, free-thinkers will circumvent them.”