• Stemming political dissent in China
• Curtailing bloggers' rights in Egypt
  • Overview of web censorship in Egypt
  • Internet availability
  • Primed beginnings for internet censorship
  • Internet censorship
  • Direction of progress in the field
• Preserving community standards in Europe
• Walking the constitutional tightrope in the U.S.

Primed Beginnings for Internet Censorship

In general, the Egyptian government restricts the flow of ideas or images that don’t follow the traditional conservative view of social order, customs, and religion. In January 2008, the Egyptian government prohibited certain Western and secular books from the 40th Cairo International Book Fair. Books banned included those by Czech author Milan Kundera and Mohamed Choukri of Morocco. Kundera is known to be a critic of totalitarian regimes, and one of Choukri’s famous works includes references to teenage sexual experiences and drug abuse. A month later, Egypt also responded to the republishing of Danish cartoons that showed the prophet Mohammed by cancelling a youth soccer game that was to be held between Egyptian and Danish youth. Also, the issues of Western newspapers that carried the cartoons were banned in Egypt.

Censorship of the internet is only an extension of this general censorship. In fact, before the large government movements to expand internet access, there was already a notion of internet censorship. In 1997, Tarek Kamel, an employee at the Information and Decision Support Center, noted that “indecent material on the Internet has triggered a lot of debates and [controversy] among society groups of different ages. The Internet society is challenged with the assignment to find an acceptable model to reduce the public’s access to Internet pornography within the framework of the code of ethics.” Kamel went on to become the Minister of Communications and Information Technology and actually launched the “Free Internet Program.”