The Short Names

Documentation of Internet Filtering Worldwide
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/

A variety of organizations, institutions, companies, and countries seek to restrict Internet access from within their premises and territories. For example, companies may seek to improve employee productivity by restricting access to leisure sites; libraries and schools may seek to avoid exposing children to sexually-explicit content, or be required to do so; countries may seek to control the information received by their citizens generally. Common among nearly all these applications is the public unavailability of the filtering lists — that, by the design of filtering systems, users cannot and do not know the set of specific sites blocked. In some cases users might ask for a specific site and be told of its unavailability due to filtering, but in other cases such unavailability may be conflated with unremarkable network blockages — a Web site might be unreachable for any number of reasons, and the failure to view it at a particular moment cannot reliability be attributed to active filtering. With this project they seek to document and analyze a large number of Web pages blocked by various types of filtering regimes, and ultimately create a distributed tool enabling Internet users worldwide to gather and relay such data from their respective locations on the Internet. They can thus start to assemble a picture not of a single hypothetical World Wide Web comprising all pages currently served upon it, but rather a mosaic of webs as viewed from respective locations, each bearing its own limitations on access. As various countries, companies and other entities employ or consider employing filtering software, documentation of the specific details, successes, and in some instances flaws of existing filtering efforts may prove helpful. This project is part of the OpenNet Initiative, a collaboration with the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto and the Programme for Security in International Society of the University of Cambridge. This has been added to World Wide Web Reference Subject Tracer™ Information Blog.