Ukraine's leading English-language newspaper since 1995

Kudos to Deputy Prime Minister Tomenko for blasting a government plan to register news Web sites

put the brakes on government plans to register electronic information resources – better known as news Web sites. “Under no circumstances should control be placed over the contents of information circulated electronically,” Tomenko said. We say amen.

At the core of the incident was the Justice Ministry’s recent approval of a procedure for certifying Web sites and placing them on something called a “National Register of Electronic Resources.” It’s unclear what the point of such a register would be. As far as we can tell, its existence is consistent with a leftover socialist urge in Ukraine to give bureaucracies something to do, even if nothing needs doing.

We do know, however, that once a government starts gathering information, even “harmlessly,” it inevitably finds a way to use it. That’s the nature of bureaucratic power. And since most any use of that information would amount to government meddling in a free media, it’s best not to let the administrators start down that road in the first place. Why encourage them?

The flow of information in a free society should be as free as possible – the government should have nothing to do with it at all. Good for Tomenko for making that clear to some of his colleagues, who still might not have woken up to the fact that the old days of government classification and control of the media are (or should be) over.