Who is filtering or blocking the Internet?
The kinds of people and institutions who try to restrict the Internet use of specific people are as varied as their goals. They include parents, schools, commercial companies, operators of Internet cafés or Internet Service Providers, and governments at different levels. The extreme end of the spectrum of Internet control is when a national government attempts to restrict the ability of its entire population to use the Internet to access whole categories of information or to share information freely with the outside world. Research by the OpenNet Initiative (http://opennet.net/) has documented the many ways that countries filter and block Internet access for their citizens. These include countries with pervasive filtering policies, who have been found to routinely block access to human rights organizations, news, blogs, and Web services that challenge the status quo or are deemed threatening or undesirable. Others block access to single categories of Internet content, or intermittently
