The Internet - drowning in its own waste?

[Moldran]

I feel your fears are based on what your government would do to you based on your ability to have free unfettered speech.

No. I live in a country in which civil freedoms are guarantueed quite well. I, as a person, would not have to fear any kind of censorship. I am also pretty much accountable on what I do and say on the net today. A simple whois lookup on my email address' domain reveals my real name and address, my ISP AFAIK stores my connection information (IP <---> physical net account) for 6 months.
It is not so much my personal freedom that I see endangered by ideas such as the ones you proposed, but the general freedom on the net.

So, yes, I want to have the ability to restrict certain address ranges or domain suffixes from coming into my home. The only other choice is to rip the wire from the wall, and disconnect completely.

If that is what you want, I have no problem with that. You have every right to restrict what comes into your home. It is when people start trying to restrict what comes into other people's homes that I see a dangerous development.
If really all you want to do is restricting your own system from connecting to certain address ranges or domains: That can quite easily be done with technical measures already. Put a proxy between your computer and your ISP and configure it however you like.

As you rightly point out "who is to be the arbiter of trash vs good content"? I don't know, but I know that someone needs to at least better categorize stuff to help out Pete when he's looking for armor, or to help you wade through the "professional" commercial sites and focus on more "amateur" content if you so desire.

I partly agree with that (although I must repeat, I find the Internet in 2004 still alot better than some peolpe here describe it). But IMO, it is up to the Internet community to develop solutions (e.g. better search engines) that achieve that without considerably giving up freedom.

The freedom on the net does come at a price, yes. At present, the price/gain relation is fine for me. Google may be pretty much unusable considering certain topics, but Google is not the net's heart, there are alternatives. So far, I have very rarely experienced major trouble finding useful information on a topic I searched for. I have the impression that a huge part of people's complaints is caused by weaknesses of certain search engines. That can be fixed. And the fact that links are not valid for all eternity lies in the nature of the net, I can think of no way to change that. Definately no reason to establish such a thing as an 'Internet enforcement agency'.