The great firewall

: The Google-China spat last week might have pegged China as the world leader in Web censorship. But claustrophobic internet policies are not restricted to China and state-led online regulation is on the rise in many parts of the globe.

The number of countries with online censorship is reported to have doubled last year. More than 100 bloggers and cyber-dissidents were imprisoned worldwide as a result of posting their opinions online in 2009, says Reporters Without Borders. Nearly one-third of the world is subject to internet censorship, according to a statement from Alec Ross, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s technology adviser.

Many authoritarian as well as democratic governments across the world are taking aggressive steps to regulate internet and online service providers and monitor what their citizens do online. France, for one, is setting up an agency to monitor piracy of copyrighted music and videos and send warnings to violators. Guilty could even lose access to internet and their service could be discontinued. In Italy, Google faces legal charges after YouTube staff did not quickly remove all copies of a video clip of an autistic child being bullied by his classmates. Several European countries are working on new steps to control the internet as part of a campaign against child porn and illegal downloads.

For starters, the current drama began when Google announced that it will not censor search results in China after attacks on its servers in the country and said in a blog post, “We recognise that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China”. The current debacle owes it origin to the time when Google introduced a special version of its search engine that filtered out pornographic and politically sensitive results to be able to cater to “a fifth of the world’s population”. Google was also blocked out in June last year when China found some pornographic result in Google.cn. China has remained adamant and maintains that Google will have to abide by local laws if it wants to operate in the country. The entire issue is now threatening to snowball into a bigger controversy.

Internet access is seen to be relatively free in India but online monitoring is legal here too. The law holds internet companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter accountable for maintaining “public order, decency or morality”. Hate-filled posts and porn attract censorship in India today. For instance, porn comics have...