World's Internet Censorship Map

While it seems rather quiet on the Internet's censorship front, the media coverage on the topic represents a cyclical buzz that reemerges with the time.

Thankfully, initiatives as the OpenNet one, and organizations such as Reporters Without Borders never stop being the society's true watchdogs when it comes to Internet censorship. ONI's neat visualization of the Internet filtering map is a great way of pin pointing key locations, and provide further details through their in-depth reports, take a look for yourself!

Censorship is capable of running entire governments, maintaining historical political power, and mostly ruling by "excluding the middle". Recently, two of China's leading Internet portals were shut down due to maintenance issues acting as the excuse for improving their filtering capabilities. Reporters Without Borders conducted an outstanding analysis of the situation, coming to the conclusion "that the search engines of China’s two leading Internet portals, Sina and Sohu, after they were shut down from 19 to 21 June for what they described as a “technical upgrade” but which in fact was designed to improve the filtering of their search results."

What is Google up to? Making business compromises in order to harness the power of the growing Chinese Internet population. And while the Wall is cracking from within, the world is also taking actions against the fact that there're currently 30 journalists behind bars in China.