Communications of the ACM
Web Freedom Is Seen as a Growing Global Issue
Governmental efforts to censor the Internet are likely to continue this year.
Credit: Ivan Sekretarev/Associated Press
Efforts by various governments to censor the Internet made headlines in 2014 and are likely to continue in 2015.
Last year, Turkey's government briefly shut down Twitter in an effort to stifle online conversations about government corruption.
Pakistan reportedly sent 1,800 take-down requests to Facebook in the first half of 2014 and had its own altercation's with Twitter over "blasphemous" and "unethical" tweets.
However, Russia is likely to be a flashpoint for Internet censorship issues in 2015, due to a new law that would require Internet companies to store data about users in Russia and allow the Russian government access to it. The law, which goes into effect in September, is likely to be a point of contention between the Russian government and several U.S. Internet companies. Twitter and Facebook, for example, are unlikely to comply with the new law; they have no data centers in Russia and are unlikely to build any there simply to comply with it. In addition, the Russian government will have a hard time enforcing the law against Twitter and Facebook without facing a possible public backlash from Russian users should the services be disabled.
Meanwhile, Google is winding down its Russian operations, in part due to the possibility of raids by the Russian government.
From The New York Times
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