government sponsored internet filtering

Should the government filter web sites? Should they block out certain web pages for our protection? What criteria should they use? There are many governments that do filter pages.

Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society are working on a study to document internet filtering worldwide. One of their first country specific studies focuses upon Saudi Arabia:

Abstract: The authors connected to the Internet through proxy servers in Saudi Arabia and attempted to access approximately 60,000 Web pages as a means of empirically determining the scope and pervasiveness of Internet filtering there. Saudi-installed filtering systems prevented access to certain requested Web pages; the authors tracked 2,038 blocked pages. Such pages contained information about religion, health, education, reference, humor, and entertainment. ...The authors conclude (1) that the Saudi government maintains an active interest in filtering non-sexually explicit Web content for users within the Kingdom; (2) that substantial amounts of non-sexually explicit Web content is in fact effectively inaccessible to most Saudi Arabians; and (3) that much of this content consists of sites that are popular elsewhere in the world.

Some of their examples of non-sexually explicit sites that are blocked:

Women in American History section of Encyclopedia Britannica Online
Rolling Stone magazine
Warner Brothers Records
ivillage.com Women's Network
The Onion

I'm looking forward to some other country specific documentation. The scope of their review will expand beyond looking at what specific countries filter to what content certain commerically available filter software makes unavailable. Great study.