What is Internet Censorship and Why Does It Matter?

What is Internet Censorship?

As the name suggests, internet censorship refers to certain types of online content being suppressed and made inaccessible to people.  The term often creates connotations of governmental censorship, which is a big component of it, but censorship can also happen on a smaller level at a workplace, or even in a home.  Essentially, any action that prohibits access to the internet in any way can be considered censorship.

There are a number of reasons why this sort of censorship happens:

• Political Control.  Some countries will choose to censor certain news media, social media, and foreign websites in an attempt to control the narrative and information that their citizens receive.  These countries don’t necessarily believe in freedom of information and hold fast to the idea that by controlling the national dialogue, they are actually protecting the interests of citizens.  Whether you believe that or not is irrelevant, this sort of censorship still has significant impact worldwide.

• Copyright Enforcement.  Some censorship relates to torrenting files where individual users use peer to peer sharing networks to distribute files illegally.  By censoring torrent sites of all kinds, they can crack down on this activity and help to maintain proper copyright protection for the creators who made those assets.  This is a highly debated issue with a range of opinions as to whether this actually is a net good for society.

• Moral Codes.  Some countries have very strict moral codes that emanate from religious ideas or cultural constructs, and they enforce them through internet censorship of various types.  Typical examples here include pornography, online gambling, weapons, and so on.  In this case, the authority restricts access to this sort of content as it believes that it has an ethical standing to do so.
• Productivity.  In a workplace setting, a company might choose to censor certain parts of the internet to restrict employees from wasting time with distractions.  By allowing only work-related internet usage, these companies hope to maintain strong productivity and keep the workplace a pristine environment for everyone.

• Age-Restrictions.  If we zoom in one step further to a family environment, parents will sometimes implement age-restriction censorship on their home internet so that younger kids aren’t able to access content that is not suitable for their age range.  This is done with the child’s best interests at heart in an attempt to curate an age-appropriate online experience.

Those are just a few of the reasons often given for internet censorship, and often it can be a mix of a few of them.  Either way, this has a significant impact on global dialogue, perceived freedom, communication channels, and so much more.  It remains a hotbed issue that is continuously debated in a number of different forums.

How Is Internet Censorship Implemented?

Now that we’ve discussed a few of the reasons why internet censorship happens, let’s look at the more technical details of how this can actually be implemented.  Because, after all, the internet is really just a global network of data transfer – at its core.  Therefore, censoring authorities must use various tools and techniques to prohibit certain sites from being accessed.

• IP Address Blocking.  Every device that connects to the internet is given a unique IP address which is denoted as a long set of numbers.  This acts as an identifying feature for that node of the network and various key information ends up being encoded in that address.  Therefore, censors can choose to block certain IP addresses from accessing certain sites – using that as a proxy for location.  This is how widespread blocking can occur according to geography.

• Keyword Filtering.  Another technique that can be used is to scrape the content of every site and identify keywords that denote certain prohibited content.  If these keywords are found, the censor can return a blank page to the server that requested it on the basis of that keyword.  This is how a lot of parental controls and adult-related restrictions occur as it leaves the rest of the internet open for use.

• Filtering Packets.  In a similar way to how IP addresses can be blocked, censors can also block certain sites based on a range of other identifying information such as certain protocols, ports, and network addresses.  All of these have different applications and use cases that range in their specificity.

• Traffic Shaping.  Sometimes internet sites are not censored in their entirety, but their performance can be throttled, creating natural friction in the experience which disincentivizes visitors.  For example, censors can monitor and shape the bandwidth requests made by certain applications and render those much slower and less efficient than others in order to shift traffic where they want it to go.

All of these techniques can be implemented at scale these days, and the countries and organizations that have chosen to go this route are continually developing more and more powerful tools and procedures to achieve the desired result.

We now turn to the impact of this behaviour.

What is the Impact of Internet Censorship?

The reason that this is such an important issue in the modern age is because of the impact it has on societies around the globe.  In the twenty-first century, we’ve seen a clamouring for freedom of information as the technology has evolved – and this is thwarted when the internet itself is censored.

On the most extreme side of the spectrum, like what we see in North Korea, internet censorship can be used to keep citizens in the dark as to what’s happening elsewhere in the world.  It is used as a means of keeping people ignorant to the vast amount of knowledge out there and in a lot of cases, it can be used to hide very serious human rights abuses because information is not allowed to escape the region from which it emanates.  This is obviously a terrible consequence of widespread internet censorship.

The less obviously dangerous implications can still be incredibly worrying for societies who aren’t able to hold nuanced discussions in the public square because one side of the argument is systematically censored.  We’ve seen this in the political realm many times and it is an incredibly effective tool for enforcing a certain political ideology.  This lack of free speech is extremely concerning for democratic ideals, and it remains one of the most insidious things that comes as a result of internet censorship at scale.

On an individual level, internet censorship leads to people having a warped view of what’s actually happening in the world.  We all tend to take the information we receive as truth, and so if we are only seeing certain pieces of it – our ability to think and reason independently is severely compromised.  The essence of the internet is that individuals should have access to the world’s information and make their decisions about how to live their life based on that.  This simple component of freedom is something that we lose in a world with internet censorship.

All of these implications are serious and represent why we should be fighting against internet censorship in all its parts – because it concentrates power in the hands of a small selection of people and doesn’t allow for the freedom of information – something that is core to making progress as a society.

How Do We Avoid Internet Censorship?

In lieu of widespread political and social shifts, we must rely on other technological tools to create censorship-free internet environments for ourselves.  We must fight fire with fire.  Here are some of the more practical ways that you can avoid internet censorship:

• Use a VPN.  A virtual private network (or VPN) is an incredibly useful tool that you can use that hides your personal IP address from the sites that you visit – helping you to navigate various types of censorship.  By encrypting this address and all your web activity, you are essentially running all your internet usage through another portal procured by the VPN provider.  

If you want to access specific geo-locked content, you can typically choose which geographical location you’d like to route your traffic through.  Censors are continually trying to shut these down, but they remain the most robust and reliable way to circumvent the internet censorship of today.

• Secure Browser.  In a similar vein to the point above, there are various browsers being built and released that include some of the main functionality of VPNs natively in the browser itself.  In these cases, you won’t use a separate application necessarily, but the IP-address masking will happen automatically as part of the browser’s operations.  

Please note that this is very different to ‘incognito mode’ which will only delete your web history.  This mode doesn’t actually give you the privacy and anonymity that you get with a VPN.  This is a common misconception and one that should hopefully unravel as this conversation becomes more a part of the zeitgeist.

• Proxy.  A proxy server is essentially a watered-down VPN that routes your web traffic through an alternative server that can get around various censorship restrictions.  It’s not as reliable as a typical VPN but can be useful in certain use cases – especially if you just want to quickly access a blocked site without having to go through the friction of installing a tool, changing settings, or any of that.

Those are your best options for getting around most forms of censorship, but it doesn’t solve all problems.  At the end of the day, we need to be advocating for an open internet from a policy perspective as that’s the only way we can unlock the true nature of what the internet was supposed to be at its conception.

Summary

In conclusion, the world faces a wide range of internet censorship activity for various reasons.  It’s typically concentrated in specific geographic regions who choose to censor certain online activity for political or ethical reasons.  This censorship has a significant impact on millions of people around the world who don’t have the same access to information that we do.  This places them at a significant disadvantage and is something that we should be fighting against for their sake.

As individuals, we can circumvent a lot of internet censorship through the use of VPNs, proxies, and secure browsers.  The battle between the censors and the companies who build these tools rages on to this day and it’s likely to continue for the foreseeable future.  But for the moment, it’s your best bet.

We hope to live to see a world without internet censorship, where the freedom of information is protected.  But until then, we’ve got to do what we’ve got to do!

FAQs

• Which countries are most severely affected by internet censorship?
  • North Korea, China, Russia, and Iran are probably the most severely restricted when it comes to internet access.  However, there are a number of other countries that face more sophisticated censorship in narrow verticals of online content.  We’ve written exclusively about this here.

• When did internet censorship begin?
  • It’s difficult to select a single point when this activity started in earnest, but the most comprehensive form of internet censorship coming from China (known as the Great Firewall) started in August 1996, mere months after the internet had arrived in the country.  In other words, it’s been with us since the very start of the network.

• Is internet censorship a good thing?
  • This is a hotly debated topic for a number of reasons, but it’s safe to say that the majority of thinkers who believe in freedom of speech and information think that it’s probably a damaging thing over the long term.  Everyone should have access to the same internet at the end of the day.

Sources

• Murdoch, Steven and Roberts, Hal, Introduction to: Internet Censorship and Control (May 22, 2013). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2268587 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2268587
• ‘Copyright Shouldn’t Be a Tool of Censorship’ by Daniel Nazer and Mitch Stoltz.  https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/copyright-shouldnt-be-tool-censorship
• ‘Traffic Shaping’ from Barracuda.  https://www.barracuda.com/glossary/traffic-shaping
• ‘Understanding and Circumventing Network Censorship’ from Surveillance Self-Defense.  https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/understanding-and-circumventing-network-censorship
• ‘China’s Scary Lesson to the World: Censoring the Internet’ from the Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinas-scary-lesson-to-the-world-censoring-the-internet-works/2016/05/23/413afe78-fff3-11e5-8bb1-f124a43f84dc_story.html