Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the Great Thai Firewall. What is that? Well I am kind of making a reference to the Great Chinese Firewall so-called, which is China has essentially sealed off if you will, it is my understanding Russia more and more is becoming sealed off internationally from the internet; they kind of have their own internet if you will.

I was thinking of that when I read a recent article from the Bangkok Post, that is bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Government mulls internet gateway to fight crime. “The Ministry of Digital Economy and Society (DES) is mulling a national internet gateway claiming it could help the government curb cyber criminals overseas targeting people in Thailand. DES Minister Chaiwut Thanakamanusorn told a House meeting on Friday that a "single internet gateway" can deter cyber-crime and other criminal activities."

This is one of those things where "beware the unintended consequences". If there is only one gateway for Thailand what happens if that gateway goes down? As it sits right now, it is my understanding there are multiple ISPs, multiple "gateways" for interacting with the internet here in Thailand. If one of them goes down and we have seen this happen before, but if one of them goes down, yeah the other ones can pick up the slack so to speak. The country is still connected to the overall internet. There is also the obvious and I am not going to go too far into this because politics isn't so much the bailiwick of this channel but there is the obvious. There is free speech implications. If there is only one gateway then who is the gate keeper? How do they decide what content is allowed in? All of those issues are also present. For me, again we did another video recently on a bunch of new restrictions being put on PayPal and essentially PayPal they were sort of locking out all their customers here in Thailand. I said at the time and there has been a reprieve on this, but I said at the time that there are unintended consequences associated with shutting off a major financial connector to Thai people and doing that could have detrimental impact on the economy.

Having only one internet gateway in my opinion could also do the same thing. On one hand I do understand people's, to some extent I understand the desire to thwart internet crime but it is not really even explained in the article how exactly a single gateway does that especially if the criminal perpetrator is abroad. So I mean how does one gateway lead you to catching that person? I didn't get that part. But to me, it is more the issue of the unintended consequence. If you have one gateway what happens if it goes down?