Palfrey and Zittrain edit first comprehensive study of Internet censorship
February 26, 2008
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Professors John Palfrey and Jonathan Zittrain
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Next month, the MIT Press will publish “Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering,” which presents the first comprehensive study of the practice of Internet censorship in various countries around the world. The book is edited by Harvard Law School Professors John Palfrey '01 and Jonathan Zittrain '95 along with Ronald Deibert of the University of Toronto and Rafal Rohozinski, who is a principal with the SecDev Group.
A product of the OpenNet Initiative – a collaborative partnership of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at HLS, the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University, and the Cambridge Security Programme at the University of Cambridge – the book surveys Internet use in 40 countries to determine if and how much content on the Internet is being blocked. Editors Palfrey, Zittrain, Deibert, and Rohozinski serve as principal investigators of the Initiative, conducing on-the-ground research around the world.
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“More than three dozen states around the world now filter the Internet,” Palfrey and Zittrain write in the volume’s introduction. “While we bring our own normative commitments to this work…our goal is not to point fingers or assign blame, but rather to document a trend that we believe to be accelerating and to set that trend in context.”
The book is divided into two parts, the first of which consists of a series of essays that lay out the scope and methodology of the OpenNet study. The second part presents the study’s findings through a series of regional overviews and short reports on each country analyzed.
Although Internet filtering occurs in countries throughout the globe, the editors point to three regions of the world where most of the state-mandated filtering occurs: east Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, and central Asia. With the goal of being as comprehensive as possible, the book also explains the political, social, cultural, and religious issues in the regions where censorship is present.
Acclaimed as “the definitive analysis” of Internet censorship, reviewers of the book have applauded the completeness of the study and the relevancy of the subject matter.
“No one had a clear sense of the nature of Internet censorship until now,” said Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University. “This extraordinary work maps the unfreedom of the Net. Unfortunately, that state is becoming the norm.”