Notwithstanding nearly routine comparisons to China’s “Great Firewall”, increasingly we are seeing courts and governments in democracies around the world make determinations that certain content is illegal and orders are being issued to ISPs to block the transmission of the illegal material.
The latest I saw (thanks to a tweet by Barry Sookman) pointed to a court decision out of Italy that orders ISPs to implement blocking of The Pirate Bay catalog of torrents.
I am certain that we will hear about all sorts of collateral damage – innocent websites that get caught in the crossfire. why is this still happening?
We have university research that has been looking at ways to circumvent national firewalls – in effect, developing tools to assist in smuggling illegal bits across borders. For some reason, it seems to be less interesting for academic researchers to work on developing more effective, more efficient, more precise tools to enable enforcement of such judicial orders.
A court in Norway rejected blocking. Courts in two European countries reaching different conclusions on similar issues. I have written a number of times [see search results here] asking about how nations can or should assert sovereignty over the rules governing content on their national networks.
Is there a body of policy and technology research to be developed?