Digital Freedom across the World
Country Comparison
A sure way to measure how physically or mentally jewed a country is.
https://eylenburg.github.io/countries.htm
>I'm aware that this is probably going to be the most controversial article on this site and I deliberately want it to be the most polemic one. Some misguided individuals may insist that encryption is bad because it's just used by criminals and nonces and if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear, that we can't protect children from harm unless VPNs are banned, that courts ordering websites to be blocked is okay because - for now - it's mostly just affecting pirate sites plundering from starving Hollywood execs, or that freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences and doubleplusungood ideas are threatening our democracy or something.
>The aim of this piece is to see what restrictions and freedoms for the Internet and computing in general are in place across the world. Besides just being an interesting study, there's also real-world utility: Where can you host a website without disclosing your name and address? What country should you select for your VPN server? In which country will you not need to worry about the police kicking in your front door at 4 am because they didn't like a joke you made on social media?
>What this is not is a general comparison of a country's freedom. I'm not looking at the freedom of press, at the election system, or at how libertarian a country is when it comes to guns, sex, or tax. This is purely a look at the digital realm.
>I am comparing a carefully selected list of only a few countries; it would be great to compare all ~200 countries of the world but it is an impossible task. I have included the G7 countries (US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Japan) and the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and also Australia in order to honour them for being the first Western country to stop pretending they care about privacy or freedom. I also added Switzerland, Norway, and Iceland because they are European countries the EU and always come up in all those lists of what the best countries for privacy and VPNs are, as well as all those "most democratic and free countries" lists - so let's put them to the test.
>Of course, there's many more countries in the world and many of them are lauded for their freedoms and protections from government overreach, for example I've heard good things about the Netherlands, Norway, Estonia, and Panama. But it's impossible to diligently compare all countries and there is no clear indication that I'm really missing out a hidden champion - a brief research shows that they all have some restrictions in this or that category. A final thought: for now, you might be able to find lots of freedom in a poor country with low Internet penetration where the government has better things to do than policing the web or isn't able to comprehensively enforce its laws. Why not host your VPS in Papua New Guinea, Transnistria, or Somaliland?
Are there pieces you disagree with in particular?
>b-but I thought fascists were all about dictatorship and censorship!! what do you mean you don't like it??