At least 25
countries around the world block access to Web sites for
political, social, or other reasons as governments seek to
assert authority over a network meant to be
borderless, according to a study relased 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 that the Internet has matured to the
point that 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 gay and lesbian sites.
In some countries
censorship was narrow. South Korea, for instance, tends
to block only information about its neighboring rival, North
Korea.
Yet researchers
found no filtering at all in Russia, Israel, or the
Palestinian territories despite political conflicts there.
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.
The study did not
attempt to chronicle the effectiveness of the efforts.
Some technical approaches are better than others in blocking
sites, but all can be bypassed with enough technical
know-how to use ''proxy'' techniques or special
software.
The organization
said the regions chosen for review should not be
considered comprehensive. It didn't include any countries in
North America or Western Europe on grounds that
filtering practices there have been better known than
elsewhere. It also excluded North Korea and Cuba for
fear of risks to collaborators it would need in those
countries.
The group
supplied software to volunteers in each of the countries
tested. Web sites checked include those for gambling,
pornography, and human rights abuses.
Jonathan
Zittrain, professor of Internet governance and regulation at
Oxford, said filtering appeared to occur most widely in
countries where Internet penetration is higher,
possibly explaining the lack of censorship efforts in
Russia and Egypt. (Anick Jesdanun, AP)
