Law Commons^™

Guiding The Censor’S Scissors: A Framework To Assess Internet Filtering, Derek E. Bambauer

Derek Bambauer

While China’s Internet censorship receives considerable attention, censorship in the United States and other democratic countries is largely ignored. The Internet is increasingly fragmented by states’ different value judgments about what content is unacceptable. States differ not in their intent to censor material – from political dissent in Iran to copyrighted songs in America – but in the content they target, how precisely they block it, and how involved their citizens are in these choices. Previous scholars have analyzed Internet censorship from various values-based perspectives, and have sporadically addressed key principles such as openness, transparency, narrowness, and accountability in evaluating …