Pathfinder: Exploring Path Diversity for Assessing Internet Censorship Inconsistency
Xiaoqin Liang, Guannan Liu, Lin Jin, Shuai Hao, Haining Wang

TL;DR
This paper investigates the diversity of internet censorship within a country by analyzing how different routing paths and hosting platforms lead to inconsistent censorship enforcement, revealing widespread decentralization and implementation flaws.
Contribution
It introduces a novel end-to-end measurement framework to explore censorship diversity at the ISP level, uncovering prevalent inconsistencies and their underlying causes.
Findings
Censorship implementation is often incomplete or flawed.
Decentralized censorship is common within countries.
Routing paths and hosting platforms significantly affect censorship consistency.
Abstract
Internet censorship is typically enforced by authorities to achieve information control for a certain group of Internet users. So far existing censorship studies have primarily focused on country-level characterization because (1) in many cases, censorship is enabled by governments with nationwide policies and (2) it is usually hard to control how the probing packets are routed to trigger censorship in different networks inside a country. However, the deployment and implementation of censorship could be highly diverse at the ISP level. In this paper, we investigate Internet censorship from a different perspective by scrutinizing the diverse censorship deployment inside a country. Specifically, by leveraging an end-to-end measurement framework, we deploy multiple geo-distributed back-end control servers to explore various paths from one single vantage point. The generated traffic with…
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Taxonomy
TopicsHate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection · Media Influence and Politics · Asian Culture and Media Studies
