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Some folks who do good work in the less-famous parts of the Internet:

https://www.theengineroom.org/

http://opennet.net/

http://globalintegrity.org/

https://www.eff.org/

Disclosure: I've worked for two of these, though not recently.

Really? Because I don't consider police raiding the house of individuals for showing films or bookshops for having books that weren't approved by the Australian government to be considered free speech. Heck, I don't consider not allowing the sale of any speech material of any form to be an invasion of freedom of speech. Australia also has some of the most intrusive internet censorship laws. They feel the need to make sure that no adult likes small breasted women and therefor can't be turned into a child pornographer by banning women with perfectly legitimate but smaller breast size (B) from the cover of pornography cases. I'm really just scratching the surface here. There is a lot more you can read about and understand on your own time, but as far as the first world is concerned, Australia is one of the worst offenders in freedom of speech.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Australia
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/11/11/3063975.htm
http://opennet.net/research/australia-and-new-zealand

With a proxy client (TOR or whatever) in China, you could find out live what is blocked and what is not. For instance, This site used to provide just such a service.

You might find Open Net Initiative's page on china of interest too.

The gathering was not a protest rally. And the reason for removal was nothing to do with anything being a "protest". The removal was due to the mere mention of china.

The purpose of that specific event everyone was gathered there for was a reception celebrating the release of that book.

And they had obtained use of the room from the UN ahead of the time for that purpose.

The issue was not that the book "protested" chinese internet filtering, but that it reports on the facts of it.

Also, the officials were unable to point to any rules being violated, only:

5. Did ONI ask for clarification of the rules?

ONI partners asked repeatedly to see any rules or regulations governing this act. They did not give us any, only referring to the "objections of a member state."

7. What was the full text of the poster?

The section of the poster in question read:

"Internet censorship and surveillance are increasing in democratic countries as well as in authoritarian states. The first generation of controls, typified by China's "Great Firewall," are being replaced by more sophisticated techniques that go beyond mere denial of information and aim to normalize (or even legalize) a climate of control. These next generation techniques include strategically timed distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, targeted malware, surveillance at key points of the Internet's infrastructure, take-down notices, and stringent terms of usage policies. Their aim is to shape and limit the national information environment. Access Controlled reports on these new trends in information control and their implications for the global Internet commons."

In related news, Guatemalan police arrested a twitter user, after he put a message telling people to withdraw their funds from Banrural -the bank involved in the corruption scandal- as a way to protest against these acts. The authorities charged him of "intent to incite financial panic", a crime recently created in order to protect financial institutions from unfounded rumors.

According to opennet ( http://opennet.net/research/profiles ), China is far from being the only country that filter the Internet. For exemple, you can take a look at the report about United Arab Emirates, about Australia, about Norway. And you can also read there some recent and disturbing news, like CCTV in Saudi, in internet cafés. China is not the only censoring country, and people should not forget the myriad of others that are also doing it.

Denmark has Internet filtering (which was kept secret until discovered)

It's new to me that the Netherlands has any internet filtering. I've looked at opennet.net and don't see my country on this list at all.

So I'd like to see some proof of your assertion.

Bart

If you want a job done right, ...you gotta do it yourself, (and host it on your own servers)

Until your upstream provider cuts you off... or your registrar cancels your domain name... or you get removed from search engines...

you missed one: or ISPs block customers from accessing you.

So what are they doing?

They might be making progress just by being Google. Connecting people to information is what they do. Look at it this way, is information more accessible in China because Google is there? Apparently when an illegal search is made, the person is disconnected from Google. So the Chinese know how they are being censored. Ending the censor ship isn't Google's job, it's the Chinese people's job. Having Google there under partial functionality is a good daily reminder of what they are being denied.

To view it another way, how is Google helping human rights in North Korea by not being there?

Hate to reply to my own post, but I did some searching. I found a blog post on the YouTomb study the GP mentioned, not sure if there's anything more.
A look at the API data reveals that it is the same mechanism used for music videos. I believe these restrictions have been in place for a while now, I believe some Canadians were complaining about not being able to watch some music video links last year (perhaps posters actually in Canada or another blocked country could clarify?). As mentioned in the blog post, I see no way to set country restrictions on an uploaded video myself. A search for "country" on YouTube help reveals information about YouTube's video identification tool which reveals "content owners" can block videos in chosen regions. In addition, this page about filing copyright complaints tells complainers to list which countries their copyright applies to. Although I'm not sure how often that's used as it seems videos removed for copyright violation are totally deleted rather than just blocked in the specified countries (although I guess if the content is stored/served from the US, they would need to remove everything that's under copyright in the US).

I'm getting tired of saying this, but you're trash-talking someone who is well-respected and well-qualified, based on what someone else thinks he said! Look at Zittrain's biog - he's a principal investigator for the Open Net Initiative and closely involved with Chilling Effects. Do you really think that he's arguing against internet accessibility and freedom? Or is it more likely that the article's author has misinterpreted him?

s/his big words and big ideas/the article author's big words and big ideas/
There, fixed that for ya.

This isn't some grumpy obsessive compulsive guy with a stick up his ass. This is someone who's involved in the Open Net Initiative and Chilling Effects, amongst others. Why not take a look at what he, himself, personally has to say?

I think one likely reason that the RIAA/MPAA are avoiding Harvard is because of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society which is an outgrowth of the Harvard Law school. You may be familar with Berkman through the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, OpenNet Initiative (mapping government repression of the Internet worldwide), and the Stop Badware projects.

Berkman is very forward-looking and proactive regarding emerging issues of Law and Technology. The various fellows have been vocal and supportive of copyright reform. With such an interested, knowledgeable band of law professors and law students, it would be a serious black-eye if the RIAA attempted to litigate on the Harvard campus. I have to believe that they would be handed a bruising defeat, that would establish precedent regarding their campaign of extorting* settlement monies from poor college students.

* I mean extortion in the common, non-technical sense. Don't sue me for libel please.

Mod parent up.

The list in the Wikipedia is alphabetical. The United States beats out everyone except for Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Yemen when placed in alphabetical order.

This makes sense, though, since the Wikipedia is supposed to "neutral" and actually ranking the nations would involve a form of subjective ranking. Rather than do that, they just listed everybody alphabetically.

However the US does censor the Internet enough to have its own article.

According to the Open Net Initiative, the US actually ranks below all of Europe, including Russia. It does manage to beat out China and Iran, though.

From this list, we can conclude that Asia really has only 3 Western nations: Japan, New Zealand, and Australia. Neither Singapore nor South Korea is Western though they are economically prosperous. Both Singapore and South Korea censor the Internet.

In Asia, the natural allies of the USA and the European Union are only the Western countries. They share similar values. Our energies should be focused on building strong economic and military ties with Japan, New Zealand, and Australia.

Our relationship with South Korea should be downgraded to the level of China or Thailand. Ditto for Turkey.

If the Chinese government wants its view to be represented, it should allow free access to Wikipedia from within China itself. That way, its people will do the censorship for it. Consider the case with the Vietnamese Wikipedia, which I'm currently a bureaucrat. At the beginning, its only participants are outside of Vietnam itself, and users from Vietnam created a made-in-Vietnam version of the encyclopedia for fear of "counterrevolutionary ideas". After featured in several articles in high-profile publications in Vietnam and even recommended by the government-funded encyclopedia, the encyclopedia saw a surge in registration and a noticable skewing of view. Now I'm even being accused by my family of being used by the government to spread their propaganda.

For the most part, sites in the local language are much more likely to be censored than foreign-language sites.

Ah, you'll be referring to this map: http://opennet.net/map/ right? (Sorry, Flash required)