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When the World Wide Web is hit by regional filters

April 21, 2008 | Internet Marketing

Over the past year, some Internet mar keters have noticed that the Web, once a global network to connect people around the world, is now subject to the regional decisions of ISPs, governments and search engines, which engage in “filtering” or censorship of content.

Following Google’s entry into China in 2005, the firm agreed that the local property, google.cn, would comply with national policy by removing some results for searches for “Tiananmen Square.” Since this landmark case, various nations’ policies have altered what content their citizens can access online. In some cases, these policies have had a spillover effect, such as the recent worldwide outage when Pakistan ordered its ISPs to block access to YouTube. According to the recently published book, Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering, 40 coun tries routinely filter results.

Morgan Friedman, the CEO of Diseño Porteño, a Web development firm that works in the US and Argentina, notes that filtering is not necessarily a government decision. Frequently, media conglomerates that own a country’s largest ISPs have control over what is accessible online.

“Technology-wise, you can’t prevent people from seeing things,” Friedman said. “You can just make it harder.”

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