How Open Is the International Internet?
The term “international internet” seems like until an oxymoron until you realise just how many “filters” there are blocking access to websites all over the world.
Ok, we know certain countries block access to a lot of outside websites, but the web may not as world wide as we think it to be.
What surprises me the most isn’t that filtering exists, but how many countries do it. Certainly, government-sponsored filtering isn’t new; many public libraries and schools have done it for years in the United States, and hate speech is filtered in several European countries. But what is new is how much is filtered and how, sometimes, it is disguised: Some countries return a facsimile of an IE error page instead of showing that a site has been deliberately blocked. Others tamper with their domain-name servers to introduce errors when searching for particular sites.
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