Exploring Ethical Issues: A Survey on Internet Censorship in IT

This essay provides a comprehensive overview of internet censorship, exploring its definition, operation, benefits, and negative impacts on society. It discusses how internet censorship works, including methods like packet filtering and IP address blocking. The essay examines the advantages of censorship, such as protecting children from harmful content and reducing spam, while also addressing its drawbacks, like restricting access to valuable information and hindering business operations. Furthermore, it delves into the future of internet censorship, highlighting the challenges faced by IT professionals due to these restrictions, such as limited access to crucial updates and hampered surveillance capabilities. The essay concludes by emphasizing the need to understand both the benefits and drawbacks of internet censorship in the evolving digital landscape. Desklib offers a wealth of resources, including solved assignments and past papers, to aid students in their academic pursuits.

Running head: INTERNET CENSORSHIP
INTERNET CENSORSHIP
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Introduction
This essay aims to discuss the topic internet censorship. An explanation of the topic is
provided in this essay along with the benefits of internet censorship for the society is
discussed in this essay. The operation of internet censorship is described briefly in this essay.
The people who are benefitted and the people who are negatively affected from the internet
censorship is briefly discussed in this essay. The process by which the society need to deal
with the internet censorship in the future is briefly discussed in this essay. Some of the
particular challenges that are faced by the professionals of information systems is discussed
in this essay. Lastly, this essay concludes with an appropriate conclusion for this essay.
Internet censorship is the implementation of control in the publishing, viewing or the
accessing of the explicit on the internet that are permitted by regulators or several other
initiatives (Ensafi et al. 2014).
Discussion
The process of implementing preventive control on the websites or on any content
that is accessible in the internet is referred as the internet censorship. This restriction is
deployed in form of the law, edit or any kind of regulation that is placed by the particular
government (Khattak et al. 2016). The reach of the internet censorship is discovered to be
varying from country to country on the basis of the rules and the regulations that are imposed
in various countries.
Operation of internet censorship
The controls of internet censorship at the most basic level is the restricting of the access to
the explicit content on the internet from any organisation or any entity of the government that
can impact negatively on the viewers or the society (Crete-Nishihata, Deibert and Senft

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2013). It might be blocking access to the restricting the utilisation of the complete platform,
copyrighted information, or any sensitive content. The users of computer requires a
connection to the internet. The ISPs are the major internet providers that cluster together the
users of internet and then serve as the gateway to internet. They can effectively work as the
censor or totally take out internet if the government requires them to. Once the internet is
shutdown by the ISP, the physical system of internet seems to be decentralised but if the
individual is still connected to the internet, the services needs to be bought from the ISP and
then use any university system or corporate system and they act as the central location of
routing and a choke point to the content (Dalek et al. 2013). This mechanism is commonly
applied in the countries where the government want to restrict the information that is received
by the citizens of the country. Some of the methods that are commonly used for restricting
the contents on internet are as follows:
Packet filtering: terminates the transmission of the information when the strings of the
keywords are discovered.
IP address blocking: blocks the access to particular addresses
URL filtering: the scanning of the URL for keywords are done and if alarming content is
discovered then the address is blocked
DNS blocking: blocks the access to the domain name of the website
Computer network attacks: The DoS attacks are used for preventing the access to several
services when it is discovered to be a potential attack and it can block more than just any
marked location.
Connection reset: if any connection was blocked by the filter, any other sites would be
blocked for significant time even if it is an accepted communication.

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Portal censorship: simple removal and the exclusion of the results from the search engines.
Benefits of internet censorship to society
With the help of internet censorship, the controls of protection can be easily
implemented (Soengas-Pérez 2013). Due to the fact that the internet is considered to be open
and comprehensive, the quality and the authenticity of all information, which is available on
internet is comparatively unconvinced. Internet censorship can help the children by providing
protection from the abusive contents on the internet like child pornography, sexual violence
and several other content about crimes or drug abuse. Women can also be protected from the
explicit contents of internet by the implementation of internet censorship. The websites that
are promoting violence against women can be blocked and any violence against women can
be prevented (Wang, Juffermans and Du 2016). It is considered that the deployment of
internet censorship would be helpful in protecting various kinds of disturbing email spams.
The disturbance caused by the spam emails are rising significantly disturbing. In several
instances, it has been observed that the spam emails contains malware that creates the threat
of data theft as this malware can damage the system. Majority of the junk emails consists of
malware that are intended to execute the task of phishing which is commonly used for
stealing the identity of users on the internet (Leung and Lee 2014).
Negative impact of internet censorship
Even though the restriction can be placed on the fake information using the internet
censorship, the real information can also be restricted and the people would be deprived of
the information. As the restrictions are placed on the contents of the internet, it can affect the
businesses and it would block the information that might be required by the businesses for
effective operations. If the promotion of the businesses would be hampered on internet or
they cannot sell their products on any e-commerce platform, then the state of the business
would deteriorate in comparison to the businesses that are allowed to sell their products on

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the internet platform (Wright 2014). The major aspect of free internet offers the individuals
with the opportunity of posting anything they wish to. This provides the individuals a chance
of expressing the thoughts, views, and the opinions freely. The laws might already exist in
several jurisdictions, which would allow the prosecution of several individuals who take part
in the illegal content like the child pornography and therefore the implementation of an extra
layer of restrictions would create a new layer of bureaucracy.
Internet censorship in the future
In several ways, internet can be the victim of its own prevailing success. By the creation of
speech and the communication easier for the people, it creates the opportunity of
communications among the organisation a lot easier. The censorship technology is actually
growing to be better and more sophisticated. Even though the technical censorship would
increase, the human factor must not be underestimated (Lim 2013). With the help of sheer
workforce for increasing the schemes of censorship, it would increase like the trending
topics, shifting the circumvention tools, and innovative web proxies. Implementing extensive
legal penalties on the access of the prohibited material is one of the non-technological method
of completing a job (Kou, Semaan and Nardi 2017). Even though, it is considered that the
censorship of internet has several negative impacts on the use of internet, it does provide
some additional benefits to the people and it can be proved by the fact that the company,
Google is now more visible and it has increased the vocal proponent of any open market. It is
considered that in the near future there would be an increase in the attempts of curbing
freedom of speech on the internet platform. In the countries, where the freedom of speech is
considered to be a political or existential threat by the government of the country, the
technical censorship would increase to become more ubiquitous but still it will be mixed with
several legal attack on the anonymity. There would be a significant increase in the
requirement of registering the websites and the web users in the future.

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Challenges to the IT professionals due to internet censorship
The IT professionals who work in the multinational companies or even in the small
companies can be severely affected due to the internet censorship as it might restrict the
valuable information from accessing (Clark et al. 2017). The IT department of the companies
cannot get the recent updates about the developments in the sector of IT and the functioning
of the businesses might be affected. The aspect of surveillance of the systems of the
organisation would be hampered due to the implementation of the restrictions on internet as
these surveillance methods are essential for preventing the systems of the organisations from
any kind of network attacks or data theft attacks (Warf 2013).
Conclusion
Therefore, it can be concluded that the aspect of internet censorship has several advantages
and it also lacks in several fields. Internet censorship is the implementation of control in the
publishing, viewing or the accessing of the explicit on the internet that are permitted by
regulators or several other initiatives. The process of implementing preventive control on the
websites or on any content that is accessible in the internet is referred as the internet
censorship. This restriction is deployed in form of the law, edit or any kind of regulation that
is placed by the particular government. Due to the fact that the internet is considered to be
open and comprehensive, the quality and the authenticity of all information, which is
available on internet is comparatively unconvinced. As the restrictions are placed on the
contents of the internet, it can affect the businesses and it would block the information that
might be required by the businesses for effective operations.

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References
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