UK companies, including BBC, Channel 4',banks supermarketspull ads on Google

[IshbelRobertson]

Bae
i think the UK companies just want to ensure that Google ensure that their ads are not randomly placed in the same area the hate preachers. Surely that shouldn't be beyond them to so do? I suspect it might actually cost these global firms cash.....

[ToomuchStuff]

A national firewall... That's such an amazingly horrid idea.
I don't disagree, but it has been done.
The devices were transparent to the end-users, and could be used to monitor traffic, redirect requests to elsewhere, blacklist sites, replace content, and all sorts of handy features.

Some of the more repressive governments on earth wanted us to add features that would have allowed them to collect data on individual users, data that in our minds would clearly have been used to select who got to be taken out and shot. So we refused to implement those requests.

The whole concept of using the technology to significantly change the content people viewed, or to inform on their viewing habits, seemed a poor road to go down to me. Handily, the same proxy technology can be used to sneak around national firewalls and blacklists, and we released some free software versions of the technology that would run on Linux, and there are zillions of copies out there running in the wild...

While you and I agree it is a bad idea, then you have governments, in conjunction with private business's that collect all that data, and then mine it, after the fact.
And while you didn't implement it, I don't doubt with all the lower level code in things (processor id's, etc), a government could split it up and develop it based on that hidden code, in the name of national security.