White Light Black Light

The Open Net Intitiative global Internet filtering study was posted this morning, and it’s an incredible piece of work. From the BBC story on the launch:

The level of state-led censorship of the net is growing around the world, a study of so-called internet filtering by the Open Net Initiative suggests. The study of thousands of websites across 120 Internet Service Providers found 25 of 41 countries surveyed showed evidence of content filtering.

Not surprisingly, Google Maps and Skype were among the most-censored material.

Before Americans get smug about things, let me remind folks that while our federal government doesn’t do all that much of this stuff –a noteworthy recent exception is banning social networking sites from computers where the military has any influence — there’s all kinds of censorship taking place at state and local levels.

Schools and libraries around the country are routinely censoring computers to prevent kids from seeing even the most remotely objectionable material. It’s to the stage in many places where a student trying to gather material for a school report will be unable to find even relevant and useful sites.

Censorship is growing everywhere, it seems — and that includes America.

Meanwhile, congrats to my Berkman Center colleagues and others who worked on the project.

UPDATE: And props to Seth Finkelstein, frequent commenter here, who has been doing great work in this area for years.

This entry was posted on May 18th, 2007 at 5:24 am and is filed under News, Free Speech. 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.