Results of global Internet filtering survey

At their conference in Oxford, the OpenNet Initiative have released the results from their first global Internet filtering survey. This announcement has been widely covered in the media.

Out of the 41 countries surveyed, 25 were found to impose filtering, though the topics blocked and extent of blocking varies dramatically.

Results can be seen on the filtering map and an URL checker. The full report, including detailed country and region summaries, will be published in the book “Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering“.

2 thoughts on “Results of global Internet filtering survey

  1. Steven,

    What is not imediatly obvious from your brief summery and the other bits you link to is,

    “how where the 41 countries selected”.

    The reason I ask is, if you assum they where randomly selected from the 270 odd countries in the world (I realy must look up the actual figure). Then the simplistic interpretation is that the same percentage (25:41) of countries world wide are also carrying out filtering…

    If however the 41 countries where selected from a compilation of informatuion from other organisations like Amnisty International and other human rights NGO’s then 25 out of 41 countries might indicate that the countries concerned might not have the financial ability to impliment filltering and might instead limit access in some other fasion.

    As somebody once said “there are lies, dam lies…”

    RGR – Clive

  2. From reading a little more one thought occurs,

    At the moment the methods of filtering are somewhat crude but vastly improved over just a year or so ago. How long before the filtering becomes personal?

    It is known that the likes of Microsoft and other large software companies are developing software to identify people by their online habits thereby stripping away the benifits of anonomysing sites etc. (Conceptualy this is like the old morse “Fist identification” or more modern survalence systems doing behaviour analysis and similar to many other bio-metric systems in that they are not that reliable due to false positives etc).

    How long before the two technologies are linked together and instead of sites being blocked you get sent to (state) controled impersonation sites with falsified data on them taylored to some extent on your percieved threat level etc?

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