Unfortunately, while Italy is in the middle of its worst economic crisis and at risk of default, our politicians think it’s more important to spend time passing undemocratic laws that will eventually limit freedom of speech, rather than take care of the economy. This is of course thanks to our Prime Minister, who has quite a few skeleton in the closet.
As a consequence of the Wiretapping Act, several websites and blogs will have no choice but to shut down, Wikipedia has already shut down its Italian page (at the moment just as a form of protest):
"This proposal, which the Italian Parliament is currently debating, provides, among other things, a requirement to all websites to publish, within 48 hours of the request and without any comment, a correction of any content that the applicant deems detrimental to his/her image.
Unfortunately, the law does not require an evaluation of the claim by an impartial third judge - the opinion of the person allegedly injured is all that is required, in order to impose such correction to any website.
Hence, anyone who feels offended by any content published on a blog, an online newspaper and, most likely, even on Wikipedia would have the right for a statement ("correction") to be shown, unaltered, on the page, aimed to contradict and disprove the allegedly harmful contents,regardless of the truthfulness of the information deemed as offensive, and its sources."
That is why I decided to start writing this blog. If the parliament will pass the law, they will still have no power over what is published abroad, and also, I feel that there is a lack of information published in English regarding what's happening in Italy.
I was surprised how the Wikipedia news didn't resonate here in the UK, so I decided to contact John Hooper from The Guardian, who wrote a piece about the Wiretapping Act a few weeks ago. He was nice enough to reply, but unfortunately his editor didn't want to publish the story.
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