E@zyVG’s Vichar::World Connected

“In a growing number of states around the world, internet filtering has huge implications for how connected citizens will be to the events unfolding around them, to their own cultures, and to other cultures and shared knowledge around the world.”

And it is not governments only, but many commercial organisations accross the the Europe and US, that take good care of filtering out the content.

You’ve probably heard about internet censorship in those “other” parts of the world. Political, social, or tool (the blocking of specific types of packets) blocking is more common than you’d think. OpenNet Initiative is made up of research groups at the universities of Toronto, Harvard Law School, Oxford and Cambridge. The study of thousands of websites across 120 Internet Service Providers found 25 of 41 countries surveyed showed evidence of content filtering. In five years we have gone from a couple of states doing state-mandated net filtering to 25.

It chose 41 countries for the survey in which testing could be done safely and where there was “the most to learn about government online surveillance”. A number of states in Europe and the US were not tested because the private sector rather than the government tends to carry out filtering, it said.

Countries which carry out the broadest range of filtering included Burma, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen, the study said.

The interactive map shows Political, Social, Conflict/Security or Tool based censorship and allows you to drill down and get a good look in places where the countries (and censorship levels) are really dense.

But ….. The ONI report only looked at official, state-sanctioned filtering, and it did not consider the situation where most controls are imposed, by companies trying to protect their reputation or achieve competitive advantage, i.e. mostly based in Europe and US.

There is a difference between censorship imposed by governments and the restrictions put in place by people or organisations for themselves. It is strange to notice that the limits on speech that are acceptable when imposed by private companies as part of their terms and conditions would not be acceptable when imposed by governments. There are a lot of examples out there on the internet that proves this fact. In an open society we want to be as permissive as possible, limiting free expression only when it is absolutely necessary, and debating such limitations openly.

Most of us recognise that there are limits on what we can say or do, limits imposed to benefit the wider society and which serve us all, even if they sometimes seem onerous. The point is not that speech is controlled but the openness with which it is done, the way that limits are discussed and agreed on and the ease with which unreasonable restrictions to freedom of expression can be challenged.

You have to look on a broader aspect to notice the phenomena. Hence it is not only the governments but as well organisations, be it commercial, social or political, that have to be included into research when next time ONI decides to delve deeper into this issue.

As far as I’m concerned, that pretty much validates my point of view on job done by ONI as well as on openness of internet as whole.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 11:31 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.