VPNs and Internet Censorship
Living in a country where the government censors the internet? Don’t worry! ExtremeVPN lets you access your favorite apps and services without any restrictions.
What is Internet Censorship, and What Purpose Does it Serve?
Internet censorship refers to restricting any website or online content deemed worthy of the action. The government of a specific country may carry out this action to track what people consume. In addition, workplaces and schools censor internet activities to limit access to certain distracting websites or prevent exposing kids to harmful web content.
Some countries use internet censorship to prevent any harmful or sensitive news from reaching the public. They do this to suppress any external influence and keep the public unaware of the happenings around them. This action often strips the people of control and douses the flames of rebellion or even free thought.
Internet censorship often comes with religious or moral objections but could also include a legitimate need to protect copyrighted content. To censor internet activities, the individual or body in charge often employs specific technical methods to restrict users from accessing certain websites like foreign sites.
However, this is the best-case scenario. The law sometimes authorizes censorship, and a violation can result in a penalty. A worst-case scenario would be censorship for the whole internet, not just a selection of websites.
How Do Internet Censorship Issues Affect Me?
- Inconvenience: The first thing internet censorship does is create an inconvenient situation for internet users. This is especially true when you leave your country and lose access to services restricted to just your country. As a result, you won’t have access to your essential apps and services, which can be frustrating.
- Warped Worldview: With censorship comes a skewed perception of the world’s true nature. A censored worldview would often contain loads of gaps and propaganda, never truly exposing the people to the world outside their country. Consequently, internet censorship also blinds the world from the country’s truth.
- Zero Privacy: Internet censorship often comes with a lot of invasive measures. Since the populace can access specific websites and apps, monitoring and streamlining user information is much easier. Hence, nothing you send out will be private and can even serve as evidence against you in legal proceedings or in-app consequences like your account getting deactivated.
- Bad for Business: If you wish to set up a company in a country with censorship, your decision-making process will be significantly hampered by the limited information accessible. In addition, it would also be a struggle to have your app (as a business) adapt to the different countries and their censorship rules.
- Tailored Entertainment: Viewers of a specific movie or TV show may consume edited versions of the desired content without knowing, leading to a streamlined or narrow viewpoint of any entertainment.
How Does Internet Censorship Work?
- IP Block: This method of censorship involves blocking all the requests and connections from your IP address to any of the websites with active censorship. An IP block works so efficiently that the block will work for all sites if the censored websites are hosted on a shared server.
- DNS: This is the most commonly used censorship method. It involves directing the website’s DNS records. This method is the equivalent of deleting a company from the phonebook. However, users can often bypass this by utilizing external DNS providers instead.
- Deep Packet Inspection: DPI, or Deep Packet Inspection, is a censorship method that analyzes every piece of data entering or leaving a restricted network. The problem with this method is that it is time-consuming, requiring massive computing power and large storage units set up at every digital border. With this internet censorship method, users will experience a slow network connection.
- Keyword Filters: This more specific censorship style allows heavy filters to be placed on online user activities. Keyword filters block websites or content containing particular words or phrases deemed offensive.
- Speed Malfunctions: This method is also known as data throttling, and considerably slow internet connections often characterize it as intentional. ISPs do it to restrict user access to peer-to-peer sites like LimeWire and uTorrent.