Once upon a time, a Chinese emperor complained to his advisor that people no longer feared him and he threatened to kill anyone who did not bow to him during the passing of the imperial convoy. “By this,” warned the emperor’s experienced advisor, “Only the guilty will fear you!”

This anonymous emperor, who lived at an unknown time is one of the characters mentioned by Uruguayan novelist Eduardo Galiano in his book ‘Sounds of Time’.

Once upon a time, a Chinese emperor complained to his advisor that people no longer feared him and he threatened to kill anyone who did not bow to him during the passing of the imperial convoy. “By this,” warned the emperor’s experienced advisor, “Only the guilty will fear you!”

This anonymous emperor, who lived at an unknown time is one of the characters mentioned by Uruguayan novelist Eduardo Galiano in his book ‘Sounds of Time’.

However, long after the imperial period, China seems to have taken that advice literally, like no other nation, by imposing the strictest possible censorship on the Internet and thus transcending the original philosophy.

The new Chinese censorship philosophy is based on the notion that the shade of fear must go beyond the guilty ones by enforcing the belief that every Chinese user should feel that he is under ‘potential’ censorship, as it is impossible to monitor the online activities of the enormous number of Chinese users.

To heighten the sense of fear, China stomped out the ambitions of the major American Internet companies, primarily Yahoo and Google, to have an open Internet in China by subjecting these companies to the Chinese government’s censorship and privacy regulations or, rather, the invasion of privacy regulations.

However, years after that absolute Chinese triumph, it was discovered that America and some European governments have been imposing a system of censorship over Internet servers and fiber-optic cables in addition to colluding with, or even spying on, telecommunication companies.

Not just a Chinese phenomenon

It also appeared that leaked reports by former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, caused extra embarrassment to the United States. A number of European governments have been criticizing the United States lately after learning that American censorship on the Internet has been in place since 2003.

The American censorship is no different from the Chinese one given that the service provider stipulates that outlets should be placed on American soil to allow access to all information.

The Guardian newspaper published a number of documents this past November revealing a broad cooperation between the British, French and German authorities in the field of Internet censorship.

These documents also indicated that the British, French and German authorities praised one another and exchanged ideas as well as tips on how to get around local laws.

A few months ago, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that there is no innocent or guilty judgment in regards to web spying because this practice has become a fact of modern life. It is worth noting that Schmidt added the word ‘modern’ to the famous statement issued by Eisenhower after the Soviets shot down an American U-2 spy plane over their territory on May 1, 1960.

However, and apart from spying and censorship, another promising form of censorship has been recently revealed not by governments but by the Internet giants Google and Microsoft. This censorship is designed to block child pornography sites or at least make it harder to access them.

Despite Google and Bing’s joint statement that such search engines will not do much in preventing access to child pornography, regardless of the number of blocked search results, due to the fact that pedophiles do not use famous websites but rather exchange materials via file sharing websites.

The newly developed programs, however, will become the decisive factor in this field. Microsoft has recently developed Photo DNA while Google developed Video ID and both programs are designed to put a recognizable imprint on any child pornography file in order to be traced by crime-combating authorities.

This technology is a sophisticated type of censorship totally dependent on private voluntary expertise and is the two companies’ notion of two-way censorship, which denies pedophiles access to major search engines (Google and Bing) and allows the possibility of tracing them at the smaller websites.

A chase worthy of the spider-web-like construction

In addition to government censorship and programs developed by corporations, communities in countries such as Egypt and Jordan, which have an open Internet are calling for imposing Internet censorship.

Conservatives in many Arab countries are demanding restrictions to be placed and their excuse is usually the existence of porn websites. Although numerous companies offer inexpensive services and free programs to enable users to stay away from unwanted sites without the need for monitoring the Internet gates of the whole country, the number of filed Internet-related lawsuits is constantly rising.

Even if the legal aspect is ruled out, the problem lies in the fact that Internet censorship is either not restrictive enough or too restrictive since it is imposed by nations according to two methods.

The first method depends on blocking the addresses of certain websites, but given that millions of websites are created everyday, this method is not restrictive enough, even though governments in countries like Saudi Arabia and Sudan ask their citizens to inform the competent authorities about the new websites they suggest to be blocked.

The second method resorts to feeding the filter on the main Internet gate with words and terms designed to automatically block the pages intended to be opened by users. This method is too restrictive as it prevents access to hundreds of medical and scientific websites in addition, of course, to numerous ones related to literature, art and entertainment that contain sexual content.

However, combining the two methods remains the favorable solution for blocking websites. Luckily though, the number of countries following such censorship is declining rapidly before the unprecedented advancement of computer science and telecommunications.