Geographies of global Internet censorship Barney Warf Published online: 23 November 2010 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 Abstract More than one-quarter of the planet’s population uses the Internet today, although access to it is highly uneven throughout the world. While it is widely celebrated for its emancipatory potential, many governments view the Internet with alarm and have attempted to limit access or to control its contents. This project seeks to provide a comprehen- sive, theoretically informed analysis of the geogra- phies of Internet censorship. It begins by clarifying the reasons, types, extent of, and opposition to, government limitations of Internet access and con- tents. Invoking an index of censorship by Reporters Without Borders, it maps the severity of censorship worldwide and assesses the numbers of people affected, and using the Freedom House index, it correlates political liberty with penetration rates. Second, it explores Internet censorship at several levels of severity to explicate the multiple means through which censorship is implemented and resisted. The third part offers a moral critique of Internet censorship via a Habermasian interpretation of cyberspace as the closest real-world approximation of an ideal speech situation. The summary notes the paradox of growing e-government and continued fears of an expanded domain of public discourse. Keywords Internet  Cyberspace  Censorship  Habermas The Internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it (John Gilmore, in Elmer-Dewitt et al. 1993, p. 62). In mid-2010, more than 1.9 billion people used the Internet, making it a tool of communications, entertain- ment, and other applications accessed by roughly 28% of the world’s population (www.Internetworldstats. com/stats.htm). The distribution of these netizens was highly uneven (Fig. 1). For many users these uses extend well beyond email to include bill payments, stock trading, ‘‘e-tail’’ shopping, digital gambling, videogames, telephony (e.g., Voice Over Internet Pro- tocol), hotel and airlines reservations, chat rooms, downloading television programs, digital music, and pornography, as well as popular sites and services such as YouTube, Facebook, and Google. In all these ways, and more, cyberspace offers profound real and potential effects on social relations, everyday life, culture, poli- tics, and other social activities. Indeed, for rapidly rising numbers of people around the world, the ‘‘real’’ and the virtual have become thoroughly interpenetrated. In this light, access to cyberspace is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. As its applications have multiplied, the Internet is having enormous impacts across the globe, including interpersonal interactions and everyday life, B. Warf (&) Department of Geography, University of Kansas, 219C Lindley Hall, Lawrence, KS 66045-7613, USA e-mail: bwarf@ku.edu 123 GeoJournal (2011) 76:1–23 DOI 10.1007/s10708-010-9393-3