Background The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is a federation of seven emirates formed in 1971 after independence from Britain. Each emirate maintains a large degree of independence, and the UAE is governed by a Supreme Council of Rulers consisting of the seven emirs...

To view this bulletin as a PDF, click here. Overview Microsoft recently added a new layer of complexity to the ongoing debate regarding the filtering and censorship practices of U.S. search engines via its own search engine, Bing. ONI testing reveals liberal...

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has unblocked access to Web sites on the Israeli country code top-level domain “.il" ONI noticed earlier this month that .il Web sites have been accessible from the UAE, and has since been testing for filtering of...

PDF Version Note: a newer version of this profile is available at Country Profiles: United Arab Emirates. Overview The government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) pervasively filters Web sites that contain pornography or relate to alcohol and drug use, gay and...

Dubai police are pursuing a plan to censor upwards of 500 search terms deemed offensive in an effort to block access to certain websites, AME Info reports. Though no progress has yet been made, according to Lieutenant General...

According to reports in Business Intelligence—Middle East, Google has no intention of engaging in an Internet censorship program with the United Arab Emirates. Google admitted to having recently met with Dubai Police authorities along with several other “entities spanning government,...

In an unprecedented move, the Telecommunications and Regulatory Authority (TRA) of the UAE is giving users the opportunity to submit feedback over the blocking a number of sites, including Flickr. Internet Service Provider (ISP) du, followed larger ISP...

Commander-in-Chief of Dubai police Lt General Dhahi Khalfan Tamim called (full article in Arabic , English summary) this week for the blocking of the social networking Web site youtube because, he said, the site contains religiously inappropriate...

Countries in the Middle East continue to block online content deemed offensive to Muslims. The latest example comes from the United Arab Emirates which blocked access this week to the Web site Ahmed and Salim, an Israeli Web site which...

The UAE ISPs blocked access to the Arabic blog Mujarad Ensan (Just a man) a few days after the blogger published a post sarcastically entitled "Lough with me and say: Our economy is in a good condition" in which he...