Internet censorship doesn't only exist in places like China and Iran.
It exists in various forms in the West too.
For example in Canada the Supreme Court ruled on a temporary injunction requiring that the results of
a competing company be removed not only from Google dossier but instances of Google in other countries
as well.
European courts ruled in favor of a Spanish man who brought a case against Google due to search results
that contained embarrassing financial information.
The case has become widely known as the right to be forgotten.
The court ruled that Google and other search engines should remove results that appear to be inadequate
irrelevant or no longer relevant or excessive in relation to the purpose for which they were processed.
In the light of the time that has elapsed an Argentinian model took both Google and Yahoo to court to
demand the search engines remove images linking her to pornographic sites.
Internet use in the UK are prohibited from accessing a range of web sites by default.
Access is filtered by the Internet service providers.
You have to opt out of the ISP filtering to gain access to the content.
In the US.
There has been a number of government mandated attempts to regulate content that have been barred on
First Amendment grounds.
Often after a lengthy legal battle the exit pressure indirectly where it cannot directly censor content
restrictions tend to rely more on the removal of content than blocking.
Most often these controls rely upon the involvement of private parties backed by state encouragement
or the threat of legal action.
In contrast to most of the rest of the world where I espies are subject to state mandates most content
regulation in the United States occurs at the private or volunteer level.
The floodgates could be opening for Western censorship.
The question of the right to be forgotten versus censorship is a complex one.
But understand that your search engines and your news papers will be used as a tool to enforce this
censorship and this is a potential threat to you depending on who you are and where you are.