Threats to the Open Net: July 13, 2012

By: Melody Zhang on 13 July 2012
Posted in Canada, Sudan, Russia, United States/Canada, Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Europe, Legislation, Arrests and legal action, Defamation, Human rights, Surveillance, Privacy, Threats to the Open Net, Political filtering, Conflict and security filtering
  • The Russian Duma, the lower house of Parliament, unanimously passed a controversial Internet bill after four amendments were inserted. While these amendments were inserted to substantially narrow the criteria under which the government could shut down a site deemed harmful to the public good, protests continue in the hope that the bill will be dropped before being approved in the upper house. In the days before the bill was approved, Wikipedia led the movement against the bill with a blackout on their Russian language site. Fears about the bill's impact triggered a sell of of stocks for Russia's largest search engine, Yandex.
  • After weeks of protest in Sudan, the government has instituted further crack-downs on dissent, censoring news sites and silencing reporting from journalists and bloggers reporting on the situation. See this blogpost for more information.
  • The European Commission claimed on Wednesday that the language being negotiated on CETA regarding the Internet is totally different from ACTA, which had been soundly rejected. On Tuesday a leaked draft of the Canada-E.U. Trade Agreement sparked controversy when digital rights activist Michael Geist noted that it contained similar text to ACTA.

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