Azerbaijan tops a list of countries blocking websites

19 May 2007 [10:00] – Today.Az

OpenNet Initiative (ONI), which is made up of groups at Cambridge
University, Harvard Law School, Oxford University and the University
of Toronto found that 25 of the 41 governments studied block or filter
internet content.

This compares to just a few countries filtering content five years
ago, said the researchers.

Topping the list in the survey was Azerbaijan, followed by
Bahrain. China was fourth, while Ethiopia made an entry on fifth —
the highest positioned African country in the list of 25 which also
includes Libya, Morocco, Sudan and Tunisia.

The governments are not just blocking websites but also services and
applications such as Google Maps or Skype, the survey revealed.

John Palfrey, professor of law at Harvard Law School, said in a
statement: "Some regulation is to be expected as the medium matures
but filtering and surveillance can seriously erode civil liberties and
privacy and stifle global communications."

The top reasons for filtering are politics (blocking of opposition
parties’ sites); social norms (blocking activities such as pornography
or gambling) and national security concerns (blocking radical groups’
sites).

Countries take very different approaches. For instance China, Iran and
Saudi Arabia filter content on a wide range of topics, while South
Korea filters only one topic – North Korea – but does that
extensively.

Iran is the one country listed as blocking across all three areas:
politics, social issues and national security topics.

No evidence of filtering was found in 14 countries, including
Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, West Bank and Gaza, Malaysia, Nepal,
Venezuela and Zimbabwe, the researchers said.

The researchers chose to study countries whose state online
surveillance practices were largely unknown. Because of this, a number
of countries in Europe and North America were not included.

It can be hard to compare these Western countries with those surveyed
given that web control in the West tends to be done by the private
rather than the public sector, the researchers said.

In future, the ONI hopes to expand the scope of the research to
include internet cafes and mobile content – and expects to find more
evidence of net censorship in later studies.