Censorship Chokepoints: New Battlegrounds for Regional Surveillance, Censorship and Influence on the Internet

TL;DR

This paper introduces the concept of 'chokepoints' to better understand modern Internet censorship, highlighting how new surveillance and filtering techniques exploit bottlenecks in content production and delivery.

Contribution

It proposes a novel framework for analyzing censorship through chokepoints, capturing emerging techniques that cross traditional location-based classifications.

Findings

Identification of new censorship chokepoints in content delivery

Analysis of large-scale client-side surveillance mechanisms

Insights into evolving censorship techniques across regions

Abstract

Undoubtedly, the Internet has become one of the most important conduits to information for the general public. Nonetheless, Internet access can be and has been limited systematically or blocked completely during political events in numerous countries and regions by various censorship mechanisms. Depending on where the core filtering component is situated, censorship techniques have been classified as client-based, server-based, or network-based. However, as the Internet evolves rapidly, new and sophisticated censorship techniques have emerged, which involve techniques that cut across locations and involve new forms of hurdles to information access. We argue that modern censorship can be better understood through a new lens that we term chokepoints, which identifies bottlenecks in the content production or delivery cycle where efficient new forms of large-scale client-side surveillance and filtering mechanisms have emerged.