Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering (Information Revolution and Global Politics) Paperback – 11 Mar 2008

This is a beautifully put together book in terms of brains, content, presentation, and coverage.

An edited work, with ten primary authors, it actually reflects the collaborative efforts of an international network of collaborators, and can safely be considered the seminal basic reference on this topic.

The first 150 pages include an introduction and six chapters, on measuring global internet filtering, the politics and mechanisms of
control, tools and technology for filtering, filtering and the international system, corporate filtering, and ethics. The rest of the book, 285 pages, is taken up by regional overviews and then country-specific summaries of filtering policy.

The motives for filtering are three: politics & power; social norms & morals, and security concerns.

Two types of filtering occur: announced, and disguised. Announced filters show a blocking page, unannounced filters pretend there was an error. Blocking anc be of entire sites, or specific pages identified by keywords.

The eye-opener for me was that filtering is not just on content, but on capability. Skype and Google Earth are two of the primary capabilities that are being denied to the people around the world by repressive ignorant governments who would rather have perpetual poverty than allow the people to leverage every aspect of the Internet including free global communications.

This is a first class intellectual, social, economic, and political contribution to the literature.

I recommend the following ten books along with this one:
The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century
The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
The Web of Inclusion: Architecture for Building Great Organizations
The Ingenuity Gap: Facing the Economic, Environmental, and Other Challenges of an Increasingly Complex and Unpredictable Future
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism
The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

This is essential reading for anyone studying the methods governments are using to stifle online speech and expression. The contributors provide a regional and country-by-country overview of the global state of online speech controls and discuss the long-term ramifications of increasing government filtering of online networks.

Even if you don't read the whole thing, this is a must-have title for your bookshelf since there is no other resource out there like this. And it should be required reading in every cyberlaw class in America. Importantly, it also contains a very helpful chapter on the mechanics of Net filtering for those not familiar with the technical issues in play here.

Very highly recommended.

Well written and straightforward account of exactly how governments, sometimes in collusion with private business, succeed in censoring information. From overt blocking to surreptitious intimidation, the authors investigate the status of online censorship the world over. I'm specifically interested in Egypt and was happy to see the author hit on most of the key points, though I think the sourcing could have been better. Definitely a worthy reference (though perhaps as an e-book with free updates since I'm sure things will change soon, given the surveys were conducted in 2006!).

As we have frequently observed, the impact of the Internet is highlighted for those of us who use it a great deal, when we are denied access to it.But as it has become more pervasive and the world more dependent upon it so has control of the information and services it carries become more critical to the governments of nation states. The result, the work Access Denied argues, is that the trend is markedly toward more filtering of the Internet at the state level, and the denial of access to content to increasingly more people. Moreover, it seems that the major obstacle to even more marked increases in filtering practices may be the current inability of many governments to afford to do so. Access Denied discusses the technology of filtering as well as the many legal issues involved, both in general terms in summative initial chapters, and country by country in voluminous regional overviews which fill well over half of the book. These include specific studies of forty countries ranging from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.

For a full review see Interface Volume 9 Issue 2.

I ordered this book for a research paper, but soon became hooked. This book my be nearly six years old, but it is still relevant to the times we live in now. With certain government bills trying to be passed through congress, such as the Stop Online Piracy Act and the PROTECT-IP Act, the book dives deeper into other nations already censoring the internet in multiple ways. If you want to learn more about the censorship of the internet then try this book out. Very knowledgeable, but it also admits where it could have used more research when the authors could not get it. Once again, very nice.