Just for example, if you look at traffic to YouTube from Iran, you’ll see this chart… showing high traffic until June, 2009, when YouTube was blocked in Iran. The scale runs from 0 to 100 and is “normalized” rather than showing absolute bandwidth that’s being used in each country. So it quite nicely illustrates  various cases of heavy-handed content blocking.

To see how censorship effectively blocks YouTube in other countries, try looking at Bangladesh, China, Libya, and maybe some others you can discover in the data.

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They’re experimenting with putting up a page that shows the number of requests they’ve received, and (partially) the action they took, for the most recent six months.

You can view their map and click the pushpins to see country-specific data. For China, it says

Chinese officials consider censorship demands to be state secrets, so we cannot disclose that information at this time.

Isn’t it interesting that rather than saying “removal requests” Google used the word “censorship” in this case?

To read more about legitimate (legal) requests and requests that do not have the force of law behind them and may simply be trying to intimidate a web site owner, visit the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse.

The Open Net Initiative seeks to identify and document Internet filtering and surveillance.

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In a post on the Official Google Blog a couple of hours ago, David Drummond, SVP Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer, says that Google and other organizations have been the targets of attacks from China, and that Google may suspend operations within China.

He characterizes the attacks as “highly sophisticated” and “targeted” — though his description doesn’t really describe the sophistication — and it seems to be much like what we’re seeing in terms of attacks against the Tibetan exile community and Tibet support groups [TSGs] in general.

He specifically says the more than twenty attacks they identified, had as a primary goal:

“…accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.”

He cites a number of reports, including the GhostNet report, which you should read if you’d like a little more detailed analysis of how some of this stuff takes place.

And here’s the punchline:

“We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”

Whoa! He used the word censoring here! I don’t recall that Google described their actions as censorship when they first started filtering results at Google.cn…

This is a welcome step forward, assuming they follow through, and I applaud their willingness to listen to others who have been criticizing Google’s decision (to provide censored search results in China) from the beginning, as well as (now) to respond to the  censorship and repression of free speech that we see spreading now.

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This June 16, 2009 c|net article —  Google’s censorship struggles continue in China describes many of the ups and downs. I’ve written a few articles about this relationship, including Censorship as Punishment and Search engines’ blocking in China “improves.” [See also the Related articles section below]

Google is reported to have around 15% of the online search market in China, compared to 75% for Baidu.com. Both companies comply with Chinese government site blocking (censorship) regulations. [Network World article cites the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) as the data source – they publish periodic reports on Internet use in China]

CNNIC’s reports are quite interesting, and for a statistician they’re a lot of fun to puzzle through. For instance, of 338 million Internet users, the “accounts or passwords of 110 million were stolen.” And among all users, 320 million (94%) are on “broadband” – but note that 46% of users access the Internet from “mobile” connections…which seems to me like they would in no way be considered broadband. Also, 28% of mobile Internet users said they would access the Internet by 3G mobile phone – what are the rest using? Maybe wi-fi is considered mobile Internet? Anyone have the answer?

Previous articles I’ve written on Google and censorship in China:

Censorship as Punishment

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The post The Onion- Internet adds 12th website appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Of course this is a fundamental human tendency – to do things we’ve seen done elsewhere. In criminology it’s called “copycat crimes.” And certainly these regimes consider those who do this kind of thing to be criminals.

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[2] Here’s the source report in The Guardian. And a quote:

Earlier in the day, the main state and communist party media – Xinhua and People’s Daily – condemned Google for providing links to pornographic websites through its search engine. Last week, the government ordered the US company to halt foreign website searches as a punishment.

See also my notes on China’s Golden Shield.

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From the New York Times:
China Requires Censoring on New PCs
By ANDREW JACOBS
Published: June 8, 2009
BEIJING — China has issued a sweeping directive requiring all personal computers sold in the country to include sophisticated software that can filter out pornography and other “unhealthy information” from the Internet.

The rules, issued last month in a government directive, ratchet up Internet restrictions that are already among the most stringent in the world. China regularly blocks Web sites that discuss the Dalai Lama, the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters, and the Falun Gong, the banned spiritual movement.

Called “Green Dam” — a reference to slogans that describe a smut-free Internet as “green” — the software is designed to filter out sexually explicit images and words, according to the company that designed it. Computer experts, however, warn that once installed, the software could be directed to block all manner of content or allow the government to monitor Internet use and collect personal information.

On Monday, Green Dam’s own Web site offered a hint of discontent over the filtering software. On the bulletin board section of the site, one writer described it as a “web devil” and several users complained that pornographic images slipped through or that their computers had become painfully slow. “It seems pretty lousy so far,” one posting said.

By Monday night, however, most of the comments had been deleted.

A similar debate has swirled within the librarian communities and library users in the US and Australia, where filtering software is in widespread use. In the US it is referred to as content filtering but it may also be called blocking. Schools have filtered on their computers for years, where it is not really a civil rights issue, but the majority of US libraries have not. Some libraries in the US have warning signs next to their computers making parents aware that content on the computers is not filtered. In the US this is generally regarded as a constitutional issue related to the right of free expression (being a part of the first amendment to the US constitution, adopted by Congress in 1789 and sent to the states for ratification). The American Library Association Bill of Rights, adopted in 1948, has been cited many times in the debate — librarians, in general, seem to want to preserve the right of access to all materials, and this would apply to Internet-based materials (web or otherwise).

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