Who Owns Your Filters ?

Via the Globe and Mail ...

Study finds 25 countries censor websites
Associated Press
May 18, 2007

NEW YORK — At least 25 countries around the world block websites for political, social or other reasons as governments seek to assert authority over a network meant to be borderless, said a U.S.-British-Canadian study out Friday.

The actual number may be higher but the OpenNet Initiative had the time and capabilities to study only 40 countries and the Palestinian territories. Even so, researchers said they found more censorship than they had initially expected, a sign the Internet has matured to the point governments are taking notice.

“This is very much the revenge of geography,” said Rafal Rohozinski, a research fellow at the University of Cambridge in England.

China, Iran, Myanmar, Syria, Tunisia and Vietnam had the most extensive filters for political sites. Iran, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen had the strictest social-filtering practices, blocking pornography, gambling and homosexual sites.

In some countries, censorship was narrow. South Korea, for instance, tends to block only information about its neighbouring rival, North Korea.

Yet researchers found no filtering at all in Russia, Israel or the Palestinian territories, despite political conflicts.

Governments generally had no mechanism for citizens to complain about any erroneous blocking, with Saudi Arabia, Oman and the United Arab Emirates being among the exceptions.

The OpenNet Initiative, a collaboration between researchers at Cambridge, the University of Oxford, Harvard University and the University of Toronto, has previously published reports detailing censorship in specific countries. The latest study was its attempt to compare filtering worldwide.

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