What's a country to do?

                I previously wrote a post about the dangers of internet censorship from the consumer’s perspective. Though most cases of such censorship that are written about are those of oppressive, authoritative governments controlling their people without their knowledge, these aren't the only cases.

                Many times, governments use censorship to censor illegal or offensive activity. For example, “German courts have imposed strict liability on ISP's for hosting copyright infringement, one German jurisdiction has sought to require ISP's to block access to extraterritorial neo-Nazi websites, and another has barred news sites from carrying links to the home page of a company that may provide circumvention technology.” (Kreimer, 20) Due to its illegal nature, censoring copyright infringing locations on the internet is a well-justified means of enforcing the law. By blocking neo-Nazi websites, Germany falls into the sometimes dangerous territory of enforcing their idea of “correct” views on others. In this case however, by blocking a hate group’s content, it shows the potential of censoring in this way for good. Finally, the circumvention technology is an interesting case to consider. Since there are means of circumventing local censorship, they need to be stopped for censorship to be effective. This circumvention typically works with proxy servers that request web pages as if they were being sent to another country, then sending an encrypted copy to the requester. Though stopping proxy servers can be effective at enforcing a censorship, it is also stopping all the potential legitimate uses of the proxy servers, so this isn't an ideal solution.

                In other situations, governments take control of the internet for what they believe to be the well-being of the people. For example, when rebels started using Twitter to organize riots and even give missile orders, the Syrian government shut down all access to Twitter itself. Though social media blocks are sometimes considered an immediate emergency measure, countries like Iran have had many-year blocks on social media due to fear of rebellious uprisings.

An interesting final case to consider is that of China’s search engines. The search engines in China are subject to very specific censorships with no exceptions. For this reason, most of the search engines in China are local to China. Google, which is in the business of making money off searches, eventually caved from their original goal of remaining entirely uncensored and decided to provide China with a censored version of their own search engine, just so China would allow them to deploy their search engine there. Google believed that, though censorship is bad, their services could still improve the lives of those in China while censored in some regards. This prompted the “’Global Online Freedom Act,’ purporting to bar American Internet intermediaries- including search engines and blog hosts - from complying with demands by ‘Internet-restricting countries.’” (Kreimer, 19) Acts, such as this one, have proven so far to be just a cry for attention in the ongoing battle on regulation of internet censorship.

Hopefully, these examples have exposed that not all cases of internet censorship are clear-cut and bad. At the same time, it exposes the murky waters of internet censorship in the case where a government thinks it is protecting people, when that opinion is subjective.

Sources:

Kreimer, Seth F. "Censorship by Proxy: The First Amendment, Internet Intermediaries, and the Problem of the Weakest Link." University of Pennsylvania Law Review 155.1 (2006): 11-101. Print.