Internet Censorship In Britain
In comparison to countries such as Iran and China, internet censorship isn’t too bad here in the UK. However, blocking does still occur much more often than countries like the USA. Censorship is usually done with a good motive behind it but it causes a lot more harm in many scenarios.
Traffic Discrimination
Depending on which ISP you choose, they may throttle or block different types of traffic. P2P traffic for example may be rate limited during certain periods or blocked. So much for net neutrality.
Website Blocking
This wiki page includes some. Some ISPs show which are blocked due to court orders. Virgin media and sky. The law is always changing and will block more when the government come up with new laws and websites may not comply such as age verification for pornography.
There may be other websites that the ISP doesn’t have to block by law but they do so anyways. This depends on the ISP you choose. You will have to go through the process they explain to you to turn this blocking off. This may be a change on your router or having to go to their website, create an account and turn it off. Example is sky blocking torproject.org by default to make it more difficult for people to get onto the tor network. Another is a popular VPN being blocked. You can clearly see this blocking below when attempting to ping.
$ ping -c 5 nordvpn.com
PING nordvpn.com (90.207.238.183) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 5acfeeb7.bb.sky.com (90.207.238.183): icmp_seq=1 ttl=250 time=7.81 ms
64 bytes from 5acfeeb7.bb.sky.com (90.207.238.183): icmp_seq=2 ttl=250 time=5.79 ms
64 bytes from 5acfeeb7.bb.sky.com (90.207.238.183): icmp_seq=3 ttl=250 time=9.72 ms
64 bytes from 5acfeeb7.bb.sky.com (90.207.238.183): icmp_seq=4 ttl=250 time=12.3 ms
64 bytes from 5acfeeb7.bb.sky.com (90.207.238.183): icmp_seq=5 ttl=250 time=19.2 ms
--- nordvpn.com ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4003ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 5.785/10.970/19.244/4.660 ms
$ ping -c 5 torproject.org
PING torproject.org (90.207.238.183) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 5acfeeb7.bb.sky.com (90.207.238.183): icmp_seq=1 ttl=250 time=9.50 ms
64 bytes from 5acfeeb7.bb.sky.com (90.207.238.183): icmp_seq=2 ttl=250 time=13.2 ms
64 bytes from 5acfeeb7.bb.sky.com (90.207.238.183): icmp_seq=3 ttl=250 time=11.7 ms
64 bytes from 5acfeeb7.bb.sky.com (90.207.238.183): icmp_seq=4 ttl=250 time=39.7 ms
64 bytes from 5acfeeb7.bb.sky.com (90.207.238.183): icmp_seq=5 ttl=250 time=13.7 ms
--- torproject.org ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4000ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 9.499/17.551/39.707/11.172 ms
Below is what it should look like.
$ ping -c 5 nordvpn.com
PING nordvpn.com (104.17.49.74) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 104.17.49.74 (104.17.49.74): icmp_seq=1 ttl=60 time=7.82 ms
64 bytes from 104.17.49.74 (104.17.49.74): icmp_seq=2 ttl=60 time=25.8 ms
64 bytes from 104.17.49.74 (104.17.49.74): icmp_seq=3 ttl=60 time=6.81 ms
64 bytes from 104.17.49.74 (104.17.49.74): icmp_seq=4 ttl=60 time=8.03 ms
64 bytes from 104.17.49.74 (104.17.49.74): icmp_seq=5 ttl=60 time=21.9 ms
--- nordvpn.com ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4004ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 6.808/14.059/25.779/8.076 ms
$ ping -c 5 torproject.org
PING torproject.org (116.202.120.165) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from web-fsn-01.torproject.org (116.202.120.165): icmp_seq=1 ttl=57 time=20.8 ms
64 bytes from web-fsn-01.torproject.org (116.202.120.165): icmp_seq=2 ttl=57 time=33.8 ms
64 bytes from web-fsn-01.torproject.org (116.202.120.165): icmp_seq=3 ttl=57 time=20.1 ms
64 bytes from web-fsn-01.torproject.org (116.202.120.165): icmp_seq=4 ttl=57 time=21.6 ms
64 bytes from web-fsn-01.torproject.org (116.202.120.165): icmp_seq=5 ttl=57 time=21.3 ms
--- torproject.org ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4004ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 20.132/23.522/33.769/5.147 ms
Censored Speech
As previously stated in my free speech post, the UK doesn’t really have free speech. Anything seen as offensive by someone can result in punishment. This goes the same for anything said on the internet too. People in this country end up self-censoring a lot of what they were thinking to publish because the risk isn’t worth it.
Circumvention
Despite blocking some methods of getting around internet censorship, it still isn’t too difficult to do. The average person doesn’t have to work too hard to bypass censorship using a proxy or publishing their ideas anonymously but this doesn’t mean the government or the corporations are going to give up.