What needs to be developed is a Best Practice for Responding to Objectionable Content.

This would help admins and governments everywhere, who sometimes mistakenly assume that censoring is a good way to respond. This Best Practice would provide guidance on the most appropriate and effective responses for various types of content and objections.

It’s actually quite possible depending on what your standards are. There are plenty of governments content with censoring “subversive” content 90% of the time for 90% of the population, the logic being that dissidents aren’t a problem until you have a critical mass of them. This is especially true for apathetic populations.

You also have to consider that Internet censorship is not occurring in a vacuum. Social norms, other state restrictions, and propaganda are all at work as well. Depending on how those play out, an otherwise ineffective censorship regime may succeed.

giafly indirectly raises a point, is blocking potentialy harmfull content (in order to protect resources etc) censorship in the accepted meaning of the word or self protection?

That point asside history shows that censorship eventually fails from the internal preasures of operating a system of ever increasing lies and half truths against the external supportable reality.

The eventual result is frequently the demiese of the censoring organisation and it’s replacment with one that is (for a while) more acceptable to the populace.

To date the longest running sensors are I belive the various organisations that deal with peoples faiths, where there is no question of provable truth or falsehood just belife. And even these organisations have a tendency to either die out with time or change their behaviour.

So the question should be “why build a framework for something that is destined to impload”?

I can only assume that the proposers belive there is some short term gain to be made, and that is what should be rooted out and robustly dealt with.

Chavez has just shut down RCTV, the oldest TV station is Venezuela.

One week before, he took over on CANTV, the national phone company, which also owns the Internet back-bone

CANTV did block key websites, taking them out from their DNS servers.

The answer to all of this ?

People began to offer links to free / external DNS servers

RCTV began to post their newscasts in youtube
Check:
a) http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070601-the-counter-revolution-wont-be-televised-but-it-will-be-on-youtube.html
b) http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=elobservadorenlinea

And TV stations in Colombia began to broadcast the newscasts from Colombia to Venezuela

Needless to say, SMS textings, blogs, etc have pictures, stories, etc

So, no, I don’t think any of these technologies works, except in so far as if you switch off your computer then you can’t access the Internet at all… hang, but that’s my mobile phone beeping because its download has finished…

I disagree. Anyone who uses a popup blocker, disables Flash, or uses a spam filter knows that the Internet can be censored and this can work well.

The real technical issue is that filters don’t scale - as the audience protected by centralised filtering grows then you inevitably get more over-blocking because anything that offends anyone gets banned.

Note - I think a BCP is a bad idea because it endorses a wicked practice. That should be sufficient motive.