Internet regulation: The need for more transparent Internet filtering systems and improved measurement of public opinion on Internet filtering

Abstract

All around the world, the phenomenon of Internet regulation is on the rise as more and more countries implement such policies, from Asian authoritarian regimes to Western democracies. At the same time, the great majority of Internet users are not aware that they access a filtered version of World Wide Web due to the “non–transparent” policy of many governments, something that results to a very dangerous precedent for the future of the Internet. In this paper, the authors promote and encourage the participation of Internet users in the designing procedure of Internet Regulation Systems (IRSs), as a way to develop effective and ethically correct systems. This can be done via well–formatted surveys conducted in national level in order to measure public opinion and point out user’s needs. To justify their approach, the authors discuss the results of the available related surveys conducted around the globe. Last, in order to attract researchers in the field, they launched a portal for the International project WebObserver.net (http://webobserver.net/) via which they provide all the needed tools for researchers to conduct such surveys with ease and with the minimum time needed.