We are censored on the internet on a daily basis without our knowing or suspecting it. Information can be blocked from us. Our sessions on web can be censored. We can search, but only within restricted parameters. It is entirely possible for our access to the web to be restricted.
Some states mandate that manufacturers sell PCs with censorware preinstalled; others regionalise censorship, using a form of geoblocking.
Costs
She says that internet censorship hurts local businesses and residents not only by censoring social movements and activism – which limits the use of online tools to organise protests and publicise information about them – but also by making it harder for small and mid-scale businesses to reach overseas markets or collaborate with international partners. And since strict internet censorship is often technically complex, it also raises costs and efforts for tech firms.
Given the level of investment that an expensive workforce necessitates to define what to close, hire skilled labour, and implement the technological process coupled with costly outages from internet providers – internet censorship can be expensive. However, the social benefits it may provide are immense: precluding access to pornography and offensive content could provide great social return on investment for many societies especially when local communities are at risk of being impacted by cybercrimes; keeping a lid on much-needed internet usage would perhaps help to mitigate their risk since making access to this medium more difficult makes it harder to access the tools of crime.
Consequences for Local Businesses
The censorship practice also affects the local businesses and communities and cost them millions of dollars in revenue and job opportunity. Freedom of speech and information are the two big components crushed by censorship. Speech freedom is the most common target of censorship. Real information can empower the people, but some governments use the repressive regimes as the tool to ensure no voice of criticism to the ruling regimes.
Internet service providers may be required to comply with requests, for instance, to tamper with DNS in order to block domains, or to manipulate IP addresses to shut down sites, or to remove search results or filter content by keyword, or to throttle access to websites or shape traffic (artificially slow data transfer rates in order to make sites appear unavailable).
Moreover, some browsers can be configured to bypass Internet censorship, such as Tor’s service which encrypts your data and sends it through a distributed network of volunteer-operated nodes. Other extensions limit online tracking and monitoring in order to help subvert Internet censorship still further.
Impact on Freedom of Speech
Freedom of expression suffers significantly and the free flow of ideas is crippled, so by extension the economic growth of a country suffers due to censorship of internet speech.The creative process is hindered and innovation takes a backseat when internet censorship is involved.The information highway is severely affected by this censorship, which reduces economic growth. In addition, the flow of creative and innovative ideas is stifled and the flow of information as a whole is throttled.
Any such effort at online censorship must be subject to rigorous scrutiny. State officials or NGOs acting on their behalf should self-identify when drawing attention to material for removal; firms hosting them should spell out exactly what kinds of speech they won’t allow and why they’re restricting it.
Transparency will discourage creeping censorship: say tech companies define hate speech as a term of service in a way that schools can’t, and European regulators put pressure on them to adjust their terms to avoid stiff fines. A robust disclosure regime forces bureaucrats to argue publicly for First Amendment rights and deters abusive practices and identifies wrongs; it will encourage users to understand how to contest decisions to censor.
Solutions
Internet censorship can be curtailed in several ways. Secure online browsers are one solution; sending content through a variety of volunteer-run nodes helps users to dodge attempts to monitor or block their content by government agents.
Other remedies might include imposing strict reporting requirements for government agents and non-profits acting on their behalf and requiring all requests for take-downs to be assessed on the merits, not simply as a matter of deference to one point of view (that is to say, disfavoured viewpoints).
The range between light to heavy-handed examples of censorship is wide. A boss at a workplace might ban certain social media websites due to distraction concerns, a coffee shop might ban porn sites for customers that could be offended, parental controls on personal devices might also be considered censorship by the owner of the device, and filtering software at a school building could be seen as internet censorship held by the tree nymphs at the school library. An ISP may be forced to block sites by its affiliates to manage bandwidth and data inputs for those they serve.