Threats to the Open Net: April 22, 2011

By: Rebekah Heacock on 22 April 2011

Every week, the OpenNet Initiative provides a weekly news roundup (dubbed "Threats to the Open Net") in addition to our usual in-depth blog posts. If you would like to subscribe to the RSS feed for our newsreel, our entire blog, or our weekly roundup, you may do so; you are also free to republish the feed on your own site, with attribution to the OpenNet Initiative.

* As Facebook explores a potential partnership with Chinese search engine Baidu, one of the company's lobbyists has said that the company is "allowing too much, maybe, free speech in countries that haven't experienced it before."

* The Ugandan government ordered the country's major ISPs to block Facebook and Twitter temporarily during recent protests against rising fuel and food prices. The event marks the second ever occasion of Internet filtering in the country.

* A Russian government spokesman announced that the country is looking to China and other countries for examples of how best to regulate the Internet. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin responded that Russia would not impose any filtering, saying, "I personally think that it is not possible to restrict anything."