December 12, 2008

Online censorship on the rise

When we talk of internet censorship, we naturally think of countries like China, Iran and other countries that have a past problem with human rights. Yet this is not necessarily, so with the rise of online journalism the amount of writers being put behind bars has increased.

More recently, there have been issues in Australia over images, which an internet service provider called objectionable material, and went on to block their customer’s access to the offending pages.

More recently, we have seen the case where the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) stated that a page on the online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia were not suitable and subsequently six ISP’s were found to be blocking access to the site.

It is clear as things move on the freedom of being able to look at whatever you want on the internet has long gone, the problem is who regulates the internet, the IWF have no authority over ISP’s or anyone who uses the internet, so where does it go from here?

Source [Site Point]