The paper was presented by Julia Lenz, PhD student at the Institute of Information Resource Management (IRM/OMI).
Internet censorship has evolved from simple content blocking to complex socio-technical control systems. While prior surveys primarily focus on techniques such as DNS poisoning or deep packet inspection, they rarely examine how national contexts shape deployments. This paper presents a comparative analysis of 20 countries, conceptualizing censorship as a four-dimensional architecture comprising legal regulation, technical filtering, information flooding and infrastructural denial. Synthesizing existing research across regime types, we identify a systematic “sliding scale” in the dominant locus of control: democratic systems rely mainly on regulatory mechanisms, hybrid regimes combine filtering with narrative manipulation, and highly restrictive states block physical access. Our findings show that censorship adapts to political and institutional contexts, often shifting its control across domains calling for broader measurement approaches beyond the network layer.
The full-text can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-28957-5_5