China Blocking Study Online

Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society has just released its promised study of Internet filtering in China. Jonathan Zittrain and Ben Edelman‘s extensive analysis remotely tested hundreds of thousands of websites over the course of eight months, finding about 20,000 sites inaccessible from within China. While some findings are hardly surprising — human rights organizations’ sites and sites dealing with Tibet are routinely blocked, for example — other findings are somewhat unexpected: several health sites and entertainment sites also are blocked. It seems that China actually has at least four separate systems for filtering. It also appears that the group of blocked sites changes over time, and there was “a documentable leap in filtering sophistication beginning in September 2002,” about the time China blocked Google to much international shock. The full report includes long lists of sites found to be blocked during the test period.