Internet Censorship Essay Research Paper I work

Internet Censorship Essay, Research Paper

I work at Infowest, Utah s second largest Internet service provider, where I am a server administrator and webmaster. I frequently handle customer service questions, especially when our technicians are indisposed on other phone calls. I have frequently received calls like this one:

Caller: Why can t I access the web site www.cnn.com? My browser says it is blocked!

LM: Do you subscribe to our XStop service?

Caller: Yes.

LM: Let me check the site. (I check the CNN web site for any reason why our censorship service would be blocking it… I find nothing questionable on the site.) The XStop service must be malfunctioning right now. I ll call them and tell them about the error and get back to you. Can I get your number?

I m amazed how many times I get calls like this, caused by Internet censorship failure, usually when the service censors something it shouldn t. But, of course, I shouldn t be surprised: There are many technical problems with Internet censorship. First of all the manpower and money needed to keep an accurate and up-to-date database of questionable sites, as most censorship firms do, are tremendous. The second problem is the lack of accurate content filtering software, especially on the client side. Also, the internet is multinational, and uses many protocols, languages that computers use to talk to each other and negotiate data exchanges, making it nearly impossible to police the entirety of the network. Lastly, there is the issue of data encryption, which makes censorship of encrypted data impossible.

The way the XStop service works is supposed to solve one of the major problems with Internet censorship software, namely the lack of manpower to keep up the database of questionable sites. The XStop service allows any user who finds a questionable site that isn t in the database to add that site to the database, with little or no review of the submission by anyone at XStop. This scheme saves XStop, the subscribing ISP, and the consumer who is subscribed to the ISP money. This is a fairly good solution to the problem of manpower: The service distributes the responsibility of keeping the database up to date to everyone on the Internet. That way they have the potential of several million people keeping their database up to date and accurate. Right? Wrong. There are many pranksters out there that add sites that don t have questionable content to the database, blocking access to those sites to anyone subscribed to the service. Now, many censorship proponents would say that this isn t much of a problem, the ISPs that use the XStop service, or others like it, can simply report problems to the services and have them fixed. This is fine for them to say: they don t have to deal with irate customers.

The truth is that most ISPs spend more money using and helping maintain services like XStop than they make by offering the service. This problem isn t limited to only services such as XStop; there are other companies out there that provide censorship software that is not publicly maintained, yet the same type of problems occur. Those that are maintaining the database can t cover the entirety of the Internet in their searches for questionable material. The Internet is so large that not even automated search engines, such as Yahoo!, Excite, or Google have all the pages indexed (Google has the largest index, at over a billion pages). The time and money it takes to keep an accurate, up to date database of questionable sites cost too much for any one entity to handle it.

The database upkeep problem isn t the only show stopper when it comes to Internet censorship. There is also the problem of filtering anything other than just the web. There are other services on the Internet that are perfect places to distribute pornographic or otherwise questionable content: FTP, Hotline, Usenet, and GNUtella variants being among the most popular. Filtering these services requires a type of filtering at the receiving end: client side filtering, mostly because they are password protected or use propriety protocols. The content must be downloaded first, then analyzed. The only reliable way to do automated data analysis, especially of graphics files, is some type of artificial intelligence scheme that can make some type of judgment as to whether the content is appropriate or not. There currently is no artificial intelligence technology that can do this without making many errors and, therefore, blocking potentially worthwhile content.

In addition to the problems of manpower and client side filtering is the issue of the sheer size and complexity of the Internet. Many people in America believe the Internet is owned and operated by the U.S. government. While the precursor to the Internet, ARPA net, was developed by the U.S. Department of Defense, the Internet itself has grown way beyond that original seed. The Internet is now a network of millions of computers, clients and servers, in every country on the globe. The rules and regulations of the United States can no longer regulate the entirety of the network. Things that are considered illegal in America can be freely posted on servers elsewhere, for example, England has no laws to keep pornography out of sight of children. People in America can access any server on the the network as they would access a server down the hall. The ambiguous