Internet Censorship: 6 Take-Aways

The OpenNet Initiative is a collaboration among researchers at Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and the University of Toronto to test internet filtering—or censorship—around the world. The MIT Technology Review reports in its September/October 2007 issue that “internet filtering around the world has grown in scale, scope and sophistication."

Here are 6 take-aways:

1. Of 41 nations tested, 25 were found to block or filter content to various extents.

2. China, Iran and Saudi Arabia remain top blockers, filtering religious, political, human-rights and porn sites. Other countries are more targeted. Libya filters political content and Germany bans Nazi sites, for example.

3. The OpenNet website reports that, in Europe, the Internet has evolved in less than a decade from a virtually unfettered environment to one in which filtering in most countries, particularly within the European Union (EU), is the norm rather than the exception. . .Filtering takes place in a variety of forms, including the state-ordered takedown of illegal content on domestically hosted Web sites; the blocking of illegal content hosted abroad; and the filtering of results by search engines pertaining to illegal content. . .The scope of illegal content that is filtered in Europe pertains largely to child pornography, racism, and material that promotes hatred and terrorism, although more recently there have been proposals and revisions of laws in some countries that deal with filtering in other areas such as copyright and gambling. Filtering also takes place on account of defamation laws. . . .

4. With the exception of Cuba, systematic technical filtering of the Internet has yet to take hold in Latin America.

5. In Asia, OpenNet reports in-country testing in Afghanistan, China, India, Malaysia, Myanmar (Burma), Nepal, Pakistan, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam. Afghanistan, Malaysia, and Nepal do not use technical filtering to implement their policies on information control, but China, Myanmar, and Vietnam rely heavily on pervasive filtering as a central platform for shaping public knowledge, participation, and expression. The filtering practices of Thailand and Pakistan are more targeted, as they blocked a substantial number of sites across categories of content considered sensitive or illicit. The remaining countries in Asia tested by ONI filtered on a selective basis and on targeted topics, including India (ethnic and religious conflict), South Korea (sites containing North Korean propaganda or promoting the reunification of North and South Korea), and Singapore (pornography).

6. In the U.S. and Canada, OpenNet says, though neither the United States nor Canada practices widespread technical Internet filtering at the state level, the Internet is far from “unregulated” in either state. Internet content restrictions take the form of extensive legal regulation, as well as technical regulation of content in specific contexts, such as libraries and schools in the United States. The pressure to regulate specific content online has been expressed in concerns related to four problems: child-protection and morality, national security, intellectual property, and computer security. In the name of “protecting the children,” the United States has moved to step up enforcement of child pornography legislation and to pass new legislation that would restrict children’s access to material deemed “harmful.” Legislators invoke national security in calls to make Internet connections more traceable and easier to tap.

OpenNet’s website offers a variety of current news stories, including (on the day I looked) the U.S. military’s ban of the ThinkProgress blog on its Bagdhad network, the unconfirmed report that Facebook has been banned in Iran, and news that Thailand had reopened access to YouTube after shutting it down when videos appeared mocking its king.

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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