Iran's Government requiring bloggers to register their sites

Whoa! This is really news!

The Iranian government is requiring its citizen bloggers to register their sites with the authorities. And the funny thing is, only those who blog using their OWN NAMES have to register. Huh?

Hehe, if this is applied here, then the likes of Jeff Ooi, Dr Liew, A. Kadir Jasin, Paul Tan, Kenny Sia, Ahirudin of Rocky's Bru and etc, must register with, ermm... say Ministry of Energy, Water and Communications?

Excerpts from BBC News:

OMID MERMARIAN, BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA

Omid Mermarian was tortured in an Iranian jail before moving to the US

The bloggers who write about politics or culture from a critical standpoint are people who are already known to everybody, and they abide by the law.

There are others who are either unknown or who write under aliases, and there's a third group who write from outside Iran.

This law only addresses the first group: the people whose names and addresses are known.

It is highly likely that if it is enforced, more and more bloggers will go underground.

This legislation would mean that every blogger who is an intellectual, a journalist, a social activist, or who writes under his own name would have to blog in line with government taste.

This would threaten the very existence of many social, political and cultural blogs. Even those that write about women.

Many influential weblogs are already being censored by the government.

This law would result in many websites and blogs being closed down. Or at the very least, they would become increasingly conservative.

Quite a lot were said by the other Iranian bloggers interviewed. Go click on the header link to BBC News.

Well, we can laugh and yet feel sad for the Iranian brother bloggers (about their Government, cause there're so many loopholes to get around it, hehehe) but then we should really hope that civil servants/politicians in Putrajaya don't look at Iran and say, "Hey! That's a good idea! Let's make this a new law!". Now, that would be another day for....

Buaya69 says... "Bloggers United!"