Indeed, the model for what would happen on a much larger scale under ACTA can already be foreseen by observing recent US federal government crackdowns on innocent, legitimate blogs. On July 16, 2010, federal authorities shut down Blogetery.com, a site that hosted 73,000 blogs, under the allegation that some of these blogs reproduced copyrighted material. Any reasonable person will recognize, of course, that most of the blog owners probably committed no violation whatsoever, but millions of hours of human effort were nonetheless wiped out by this new kind of random, arbitrary censorship. Would you invest your time and energy into developing a high-quality blog if you feared that it could be destroyed at any moment, and not because of any action you took?

ACTA's provisions would amplify the already-onerous Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998. Prior to DMCA, copyright infringement was a civil offense; if the holder of "intellectual property rights" to a work found himself inconvenienced by its unauthorized distribution, he could sue the "infringer" in court. The DMCA criminalized copyright infringement and has rendered thousands of innocent creators' work subject to notorious and frivolous takedown notices, but it retained important protections for individual consumers and Internet service providers (ISPs). For instance, the DMCA's "safe harbor" provisions absolved ISPs from liability for any copyright infringement on the part of their customers. ACTA would eliminate this protection and require ISPs to become an enforcement arm of the treaty, under threat that the ISPs themselves would be fined or shut down if they did not comply.

“…. Given cheap access to the Internet, and the Exponential Growth in Web Surfing, a Tipping Point will soon be reached where all Human Activity is devoted to Surfing the Web resulting in the Catastrophic Collapse of Civilization….”

Now, the Gatekeepers, their gates electronically melted, have to explain why such notions do not have any merit, and why people should not vote for them. Since the Gatekeepers have spent all their lives loftily refusing to participate in any such arguments, instead only contriving verbal formulae to demonise all such notions as "extreme", "selfish", "old fashioned", "racist", "far right", and so on, they are, not surprisingly, very frightened at suddenly having to overturn the habits of a lifetime. What, they wonder, if they make even greater fools of themselves than the internet, by telling voters directly about all these wickednesses, has made of them already? What if they join in these arguments, but then lose? Well, indeed.

The bill's draft states that "the president may order a cybersecurity emergency and order the limitation or shutdown of Internet traffic" and would give the government ongoing access to "all relevant data concerning (critical infrastructure) networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access."

The Australian government, anxious to catch up with the police state mentality of Mother England, intends to make Internet filtering mandatory for the entire country and has said they intend to ban access to 10,000 different websites. In fact, Wikileaks was added to the banned list because it told people which sites were banned. As the Australian government sees it, the list of banned sites is itself banned material. People must not be allowed to know what they aren’t allowed to know. Anyone informing the Australian public of what is banned can go to jail for ten years.

Less than two months away from the stipulated implementation date of the EU directive, can light be seen in the Bulgarian bowl? The challenge, then, to all who care that we do not “break the back of freedom“, is to find out.

Do you want the state (and anyone who can gain access to the system) to have a record of your religious and political beliefs, your sexual interests and relationships, your financial and medical worries - "just in case" they ever become of interest to the authorities?

You wouldn't tolerate someone creeping into your home at any time, night and day, to go through your and your family's private things. You shouldn't put up with this.