In the past few months, an interesting debate has emerged in Mexico regarding the upcoming federal congressional elections after the electoral reform (a constitutional amendment) of 2007. According to various news reports, Marco Antonio Gómez Alcántar, a member of the Federal Elections Institute (IFE), an autonomous public organism that oversees Mexican elections, has expressed that, if necessary, they will eliminate content from YouTube that “denigrates and calumniates” participating political parties and possible candidates.

Many a DVD collector over the years has been disappointed upon learning that their rare DVD from Taiwan or France can't be played on their American DVD player. Just as DVD region codes limit viewing to a geographic area, the geofiltering of web-based videos and other sites limits viewers from outside of a particular region from accessing them.

This technique is often applied to the Web sites of television stations (such as CBS, Hulu, and Netflix in the United States), gambling sites, and dating sites, as well as a number of U.S. and other military sites, but appears to be catching on in other realms.

Middle East countries continue to censor content deemed offensive to Muslims

From January 18th until the end of the month, major Kyrgyz Internet service providers serving 80% of the nation’s Internet users were under a major hackers’ attack essentially leaving the country offline.

Uzbek information agency Fergana.ru reported that national Internet service providers blocked access to the most popular blogging service in the country. According to the allegations, the website was blocked because of pictures of a local entrepreneur posted on Livejournal user’s blog.

A recent report on user-generated content on social media and blogging platforms in China reveals that there is variation in censorship levels across fifteen different blogging platforms according to Radio Free Asia.

Not a single porn site can be found on Belorussian servers, according to the country's Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Should we expect companies to give clear and timely information when users’ privacy and freedom of speech have been jeopardized, especially if this is due to government restrictions which may conflict with the internationally recognized human rights of freedom of expression and privacy?

In May 2008, it was reported that the Arabic language version of Wikipedia had been filtered by Syrian authorities. The site remained blocked until last week, when it was reported that the site had become accessible on all Syrian ISPs. Recent reports to Herdict Web corroborate that fact.

The recent launch of Measurement Lab (M-Lab) provides consumers, regulators, and content providers with the details about their network’s performance, according to CNET. Backed by Google, the New America Foundation (affiliated with the Democratic Party), and the PlanetLab consortium, M-Lab aims to increase network transparency by allowing researchers to share data relating to network performance and regulation.