Web filtering and the ‘Great Firewall of China’ case

Even though people mostly understand the strengths of Web filtering , their fears for over-zealous usage aren’t totally unprovoked. As it happened a few times in history, some safe websites have got blocked while a lot of harmful ones have been remaining accessible. Nevertheless, they still might be considered as a matter of accident. Things change when Url filtering turns into a censorship. And that’s what the ‘Great Firewall of China’ case is. The common for whole China Web filter was configured in a way to block politically-determined phrases and websites. Probably, the widest-known dispute occurred among Google managers and Chinese government. Chinamen forced Google to omit all the websites containing, for example, information about things that happened on Tiananmen Square in 1989. Furthermore, the sites belonging to Taiwan or written in Taiwanese get blocked. The same with Tibet Independence Movement and Dalai Lama. Even though all the mentioned examples come from far East, Internet censorship is much more popular than it seems to be. Many, even western, countries decide to block some websites ‘from above’. Surely, if anyone saw the real list of blocked domains, would be shocked.