censorship

While individual countries grapple with their own laws over limitations on the Internet, the United Nations is also looking at possible amendments to a telecommunications treaty that could amount to worldwide Internet censorship.

The World Conference on International Telecommunications is to be held in Dubai this December and more than 190 countries are expected to attend. One of the matters to be discussed at the conference is changes to a 24-year-old telecommunications treaty called the International Telecommunications Regulations, according to the Associated Press.

In preparation for the meeting, dozens of countries have been debating possible changes behind closed doors, according … Read more

An Indian court has decided to clarify a previous order that saw entire Web sites taken down for fear of a single movie being pirated.

India's Medianama is reporting today that the Madras High Court recently limited a badly drafted April ruling on the subject. The court said in its updated ruling, according to Medianama, which obtained a copy of it, that "the interim injunction is granted only in respect of a particular URL where the infringing movie is kept and not in respect of the entire website. Further, the applicant is directed to inform about the particulars … Read more

The House Energy and Commerce Committee is expected this week to approve a resolution (PDF) strongly critical of growing efforts to transfer key aspects of Internet governance to the International Telecommunications Union, an agency of the United Nations.

The resolution was introduced by Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.) as part of a hearing last month on the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications, which will convene in Dubai late this year to rewrite an international treaty on communications overseen by the ITU.

The WCIT process is secret, but proposals drafted by the 193 ITU member nations and nonvoting affiliate organizations … Read more

Google reports it has seen an "alarming" incidence in government requests to censor Internet content in the past six months.

The Web giant said it received more than 1,000 requests from governments around the world to remove items such as YouTube videos and search listings. The company, which said it complied with more than half the requests, released a catalog of those requests as part of its biannual Global Transparency Report.

"Unfortunately, what we've seen over the past couple years has been troubling, and today is no different," Dorothy Chou, Google's senior policy … Read more

Censorship is a slippery slope. The United Kingdom: my home. Case in point.

Nearly five years ago, the U.K. flipped the Web censorship switch. Most U.K. residents didn't even notice. Designed by telecommunications giant British Telecom (BT), "Cleanfeed" was used to filter out child abuse imagery, and it did so with great success.

Users would not see a notice or a startling warning about the content they had inadvertently accessed or had tried to reach. The page just wouldn't load.

In 2007, Home Office minister Vernon Coaker ordered all U.K. ISPs to subscribe to Cleanfeed … Read more

A 9-year-old schoolgirl in the U.K. was forced to close down her popular blog due to a local council's intervention -- though public attention quickly got that action reversed.

The student from West Scotland, Martha Payne, aka "VEG", ran a blog that documented her school meals with a commentary in May this year. The blog, titled "Never Seconds", quickly became a popular hot spot for debate and review of the school's food and what is on offer for schoolchildren in general.

Racing past the 2 million page view mark, what probably started as … Read more

The two lawmakers who spearheaded a protest in January against controversial antipiracy legislation said today that they want the country to adopt an Internet Bill of Rights.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), said today at the Personal Democracy Forum 2012 in New York that the country needs a way to guarantee citizens their Internet freedoms.

"What we need is a way to measure how we're going to ensure the voice of [Internet] networks is protected," Wyden said during an interview the two lawmakers gave to Andrew Rasiej, an entrepreneur and founder of the … Read more

Last month it was blog users, this month it's blog owners. The Chinese government announced today that it will tighten restrictions on all Internet service providers for blogs, microblogs, and online forums -- forcing them to act as Web police, according to the Associated Press.

This is just the latest in a long list of restrictions that the government is enforcing on its citizens. According to the Associated Press, China began requiring real-name registration on all microblogs in December. However, people still seem to be sneaking under the radar.

The new restrictions entail making the Internet providers act as … Read more

The Recording Industry Association of America's CEO, Cary Sherman, testified before Congress today on "The Future of Audio." Although the minutes of the hearing aren't yet available, Sherman did publish a statement of his speech, according to TorrentFreak, which first reported this news.

In Sherman's statement, he stresses that online piracy must be stopped and one of the ways to do this is by having search engines, like Google and Bing, censor any results that could lead users to sites with illegally obtained copyrighted material.

"Major advertisers and ad agencies announced a series of … Read more