Unless the UK significantly increases its military capacity and sets up world government, they will not be able to shut down the internet. The internet will still exist. The best they can hope for is a great firewall / North Korea type situation which would require a much more authoritarian (moreover functioning) government than even the UK can muster.
2) The great firewall was complicated by the design goal of accessing some, but not all, foreign websites. The UK could accomplish their goals in a day or two by just cutting all the underwater cables. That sounds like an impossible crazy thing, but so did Brexit a couple years ago.
A large amount (if not the vast majority) of fibre optics from Europe to Americas, go though the UK and cutting them off cuts off the biggest parts of the world from each other.
China, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Russia... Aren't progressive by any metric.
I disagree that this is a partisan thing however. Whether it's Canada, the UK or anywhere else it seems each party in power just pushes for more surveillance and more censorship, just using different excuses to justify their actions.
For example, Harper's conservative government put forth bill C-13 (online crime excuse) and C-30 ('think of the children' excuse), which arguably laid the way for much of the spying apparatus that is currently in place against Canadian citizens. And while Obama allowed the NSA's warrantless internet surveillance program, Trump extended it until 2024.
All governments want to spy on you, and all governments want to be able to control what you say, period. They just want you to beg for it first.
(Side note: the American Republican party is big government conservatives. Their rhetoric is irrelevant - look at what they do, not at what they say they want to do.)
Is this common knowledge? It's the first claim I've encountered of Canada attempting Internet censorship.
Are you sure you are not speaking of liberals, who believe government should be applied liberally?
Not like any of them act as they speak, but if I am not mistaken, that's what the words mean.
No, they believe "traditional" systems should be retained (i.e. conserved).
> government should be applied liberally?
That is almost diametrically opposite to the use of the word liberal as applied to politics.
Either way, many conservatives are collectivists: they believe the needs of society and preservation of tradition outweigh the desires of individuals, and so they tend to be in favor of concepts such as the traditional family excluding gay people, the rule of mothers in child rearing being more important than the freedom of women to pursue careers and so on.
The opposite of conservatives are progressives, people who believe the status quo is not generally good, and who seek to use the power of the state to change the status quo in a direction they believe is progress.
There are also many collectivist progressives, and as such tend to want things like egalitarian schooling even if certain extraordinary kids may be kept behind, or supporting progressive taxation such that those who have more have to give more to the collective.
On a different axis, we have liberals, who are the opposite of collectivists. Liberals can be conservative or progressive, but they ultimately believe that the most important value is individual freedom.
An example of a liberal conservative is someone like Ron Paul. He believes the status quo is generally good and shouldn't be changed to much, except where he thinks government has over reached. However, he also believes government shouldn't involve itself in people lives, even to preserve societal values, so he tends to support the legalization of Marijuana and perhaps even gay marriage (though given electoral realities, in not sure of his public position on the second). Contrast this to a more collectivist conservative like justice Clarence Thomas, who believes the state should ban gay marriage and even sodomy and contraception.
