Internet Censorship

Internet censorship means the authority’s controlling or suppressing the publication of any particular articles or information on internet, and also limiting the people’s access to read such kinds of information. In some ways, it is similar to off-line censorship. The difference is that national borders seem to be more permeable on line. For example when a country’s government ban some sorts of information, the people of that country can find the information they want from the websites based outside of that country. However, the government may try to suppress their people from having access to such websites by means of filtering and censorship even if they have no control over them. Filterings are normally done through the blacklists, containing the names of illegal websites. These blacklists are not usually published or revealed to public, and the authorities produce them either manually or automatically. Total control over the internet connected computers, and total internet censorship of information in some authoritarian countries such as Iran or North Korea, seem to be absolutely difficult because of the underlying distributed technology available on internet. For example data havens or pseudonymity such as free net allow the people to have unconditional free speech ,as the technology guarantees for the users that the materials are not removable and that the author of any type of information find it impossible to link to an organization or physical identity. Sometimes, the authorities are very deceitful. They normally deceive the internet users by the ISP, providing the fake messages of “not found”, “Error” or “Error 404”, which means the internet page exists, but they have blocked it. However, in November 2007, the father of internet Mr. Vint Cerf predicted that government led control of internet will soon fail due to the increasing level of private ownership.