In the summer of 2002 a federal judicial panel of the U.S. District Court for the Third Circuit struck down the law. The court concluded that sections of this law were “invalid under the First Amendment.” The federal government appealed the case to the Supreme Court, and in late June 2003, that court vacated the district court’s ruling and upheld Children Internet Protection Act. In its 6–3 decision, the Supreme Court concluded that limitations imposed by Children Internet Protection Act on Internet access were equivalent to limitations on access to books that librarians choose to acquire or not acquire. There was consensus that filters are inaccurate instruments for restricting the access of children to pornographic material because those filters sometimes block sites that adults have a right to see. Nonetheless, the majority of the Supreme Court concluded that First Amendment rights were not being infringed by this law, as long as adults could request that the filters be disabled, without unnecessary delay.
Other countries have taken more extreme and direct steps to protect their citizens from objectionable content. In some countries, comprehensive restrictions on Internet traffic have been imposed for social and political purposes. Saudi Arabia, China, Singapore, and a host of other countries have put into effect countrywide filtering systems by blocking sexually explicit content, usually at the level of the destination ISP. In Saudi Arabia, all Internet traffic is routed through a proxy server that weeds out certain Web sites based on filtering criteria determined by the state. The blocked sites included pornographic sites along with those that might offend the sensibilities of its citizens. This would include objectionable content critical of the Islamic religion or political discourse critical of the Saudi regime. Political dissent is not tolerated in Saudi Arabia, and government officials wanted to be sure that the Web would not provide a forum to foment such dissent. In addition, many other sites, “including anonymizers and translators which might themselves be easy launching pads to otherwise-blocked sites” are filtered out as well.
Although China has embraced digital technology and has tried to extend Internet usage among its citizens, it seeks to keep out the “foreign ‘flies’—from liberalism to democracy to pornography—that will come in with the Internet” (“Wired China,” 2000). China requires ISPs to install routers capable of blocking problematic IP addresses. Thus, routers across the country have been skillfully configured to delete packets that have objectionable content. China’s filtering software blocks many mass media Web sites such as those operated by the BBC, CNN, and the Washington Post. Private companies that offer Internet access in China must abide by the same rules. All service providers and media companies operating in China must sign the Public Pledge on Self-Discipline, promising not to produce or make available information that would violate the country’s censorship laws. As a consequence, “if someone in Shanghai uses Yahoo! China to query the term ‘Taiwan independence,’ the search will yield no results”.
India, a democratic state, has also implemented Internet content filtering on a countrywide basis. The Open Net Initiative (2004) reports that Indian Ministry of Communications & Information Technology has ordered Indian Internet Service Providers to block sites such as Yahoo!Group kynhun and HinduUnity.org. The latter site was ordered blocked because it contains “inflammatory anti-Islamic material.” The Open Net Initiative reported that the Indian ISPs complied with the order in a way that “result[ed] in collateral blocking of thousands of newsgroups.” Now The Open Net Initiative has been adapted into several countries. It has become a joint project whose goal is to monitor and report on surveillance and internet filtering practices by several nations.
Thus, the Internet is subject to various forms of censorship at the national level. The firewalls and filtering mechanisms used for this purpose are far from foolproof, but they make it much more difficult for Internet users to retrieve sought after information. They also “represent the most effective point of blockage along the path of data from faraway places into the personal computers of Internet users within those countries”.
