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14 reasons why the filter is a bad idea |
Overblocking"Overblocking" occurs when a government's clumsy attempts to censor one piece of "unwanted" content result in other content that is not "unwanted" also being blocked. If one were going to implement censorship of the internet that is at all comparable with censorship of the offline world, the unit of censorship would be the URL (Uniform Resource Locator). A URL, e.g. http://dodgybrothers.com/political_satire.jpg , identifies a specific image, video, text document, etc., that a government could in principle classify as "unwanted" and then require an ISP to block. However with over 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) URLs and many of them quite dynamic, this is relatively time consuming. Therefore you might reasonably suspect that Chairman Krudd will get lazy. Unfettered by any need to prove in a court of law that the content is "unwanted" or otherwise to be accountable in any way, Chairman Krudd would soon enough give up on blocking specific URLs and instead block progressively larger units of information, namely:
Some overseas countries have taken the approach from the outset of blocking entire web sites. Each of these larger units of information represents overblocking, sometimes on a dramatic scale. In the scenario that everything on a web server is blocked, this represents a serious risk to any businesses whose web sites are hosted on the same web server. Another way in which overblocking can occur is that an ISP, either by choice or by government diktat, uses commercially available filtering software but this software deliberately blocks more than just the URLs that are on Chairman Krudd's secret blacklist. It is possible then that even Chairman Krudd himself would not be in control of what additional sites would be being blocked. |