Ask HN: is there still a country without web censorship?

Side note: I don't consider DMCA censorship - most of the time the content is available elsewhere, it's just that someone's nicked a copy from the original author (or whoever owns the rights).

If I send a takedown notice to someone who's ripped off an article from my blog, people can still read the article on my blog.

The US web is not really censored. DMCA is not censorship and COPPA is a violation of federal law for various reasons.

There are two ways to think of "web censorship":

The first is that web censorship (as opposed to just plain old regular censorship) requires filtering or interfering with the end-to-end principle. In this case, the U.S isn't really censored (although we had a close call with SOPA / PIPA). The DMCA and COPPA don't affect the end-to-end principle or block content -- they only threaten penalties on various people on the edges of the network.

The second way to think about this is to say that threatening penalties on people for what they say IS Internet Censorship. The question now isn't about "web censorship" per se, but really about whether said country has any restrictions on speech that can be applied to speech online. And if you take a very strict view of free speech rights, I'm pretty dubious you'll find any country that fits the bill (except perhaps some tiny nation with almost no laws to begin with).

Varying levels of "speech" you'd need to permit to be completely "censorship" free:

* Spammy advertisements

* Infringement of any and all IP rights

* Hate speech

* Threats

* Cyberbullying and other intentional inflictions of emotional distress

* Publication of private data

* (Re)-distribution of child porn

I don't know if there's any place without de jure Internet censorship, but there are several places where there is de facto no Internet censorship.

Most of the Balkans fall under that.

I think that here in Uruguay, we don't have any kind of internet censorship, but we have a monopolic ISP owned by the state, so... At any moment they could turn on the censorship switch and there is almost nothing you could do about it.

I feel like this is the general situation on countries where you "don't" have internet censorsihip, you don't, today.

Most parts of the European Union? Obviously there are some exceptions like the UK but overall there are few countries that have either the technical infrastructure or the legal framework required to perform large-scale Internet censorship (please correct me if I'm wrong). Of course it's difficult to draw the line between politically motivated censorship (which most people are concerned about) and legitimate, small-scale censorship of websites that contain illegal content. I don't consider content removal due to copyright issues (e.g. on Youtube) censorship, for example, but I'm of course aware that governments often justify the censoring of content through its alleged illegality. Before talking about the extent of censorship on the Internet it would be necessary to have a good definition of the term first, I think.

I think it's important to be clear about what you mean by the word "censorship."

Generally it's considered to be a restriction on freedom of expression by a system of legal authority. Generally it is not thought to include matters of private choice and contracts, even if the sanctity of those contracts are enforced by the system of authority.

The U.S. has a system of law that permits people to control the distribution of their expressions. Tool can decide they don't want their music distributed by iTunes, and the government will enforce that decision. But it's not censorship because iTunes is not expressing any original thought by selling digital copies of Tool's albums. And Tool themselves are free to post their own music online with no restriction.

Iceland is relatively free of censorship. There are a couple of IP numbers filtered by way of court order (hosted images of minors in compromising positions), but sadly those filters have collateral damage (shared hosting sites on same IPs). Interior Ministry is in awe of the results in the UK and wants to do the same. Resistance to the ideas is pretty high since the general population has a pretty good idea of the entailments. (side note: a popular Icelandic blog and news aggregator, eyjan.is is blocked by the UK porn filters, bit of an irony really).

I'm pretty sure there is no censorship in Croatia. Not because of the general philosophy, but simply because I am convinced everyone who works in the government's tech department still thinks FORTRAN is the latest shit in computer science.

The amount of expertise in this country is shamefully low[1].

[1]: Citation needed, but my experience with "technical high ups" would indicate so.

Poland censors nothing. So far. There have been efforts to introduce censorship, so far effectively countered.

You can turn it off in the UK; right?

Spain: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Spain#Internet_cens...

None of the filtering in the UK is legally mandated, and only the major ISPs implement it. Smaller ISPs still offer a completely unfiltered service.

Monaco? Small islands like Jersey (UK)?

Maybe Bhutan.

I believe the Moon has no censorship that is readily observable. Then again the Moon is not a country. The real question is is there a country with a provable lack of web censorship? Assuming of course you can define that well enough.

Australia