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I finished reading https://jigsaw.google.com/the-current/shutdown/ the other day, this beautiful presentation highlights mostly the spectrum of political 'lights out' events when entire regions are denied access to the Internet, for example during elections. I commend them for including a lot of references there, the kind of action modern journalists don't need to do apparently. One of these references linked this UN document: https://undocs.org/A/HRC/47/24/Add.2 One of the most flagrant attacks on the Internet that had an immediate impact on me personally were commited in Belarus and Russia in the recent years. In the past 7 or 8 years Russia had been tightening their control over the Internet and that included banning websites (like EVE Online and their wiki article about an in-game drug LOL) or bloggers/apps that did not agree with the mandatory "registry" registration, e.g. Telegram. In their attempt to ban Telegram, the government has had over 2 million IPs of Google and Amazon blocked which led to massive and unrelated service failures. Some of the international traffic in and out of Belarus is routed through big russian transit providers and as a result some of these blocks have unlawfully hit belarussian citizens. And of course these laws were used to block political websites. How often does Russia appear in this report? Answer: ONCE. As a footnote 78 on page 12. This doesn't reference law changes from 2012-2014 and later that lead to current blocks! Belarus' internet censorship. I don't think I have to explain much because this was so recent during the last "election". At least the report acknowledges it fully, five times no less: I can confirm there were disruptions, but I'm still here thanks to AirVPN : ) Thanks for non-standard connection options. I don't know who exactly they're talking about, but this reminds me of Cisco helping to build the Great Firewall of China! The UN welcomes internet censorship How often does China appear in this report? Occurrences: 0. What's legal today can quickly become illegal tomorrow, no matter justified or not, morally correct or not. The UN completely agrees with such laws: just please don't block the entire internet, ok? Basically totalitarian governments can do whatever if they take 2 months time to write it as law. Maybe the new law was put together by a lobby group, doesn't matter. You are allowed to censor then. American services banning Iranian users if connected without VPN? Totally cool with that! Russia banning 2 million IPs? Haha at least you didn't ban 4 milliard IPs, you get a free pass! Ukraine blocks access to all russian social networks due to war in the east? Ukraine, occurrences = 0. The UN loves "lawful" internet censorship.

A few days ago, Obama supposedly gave control of the Internet's global Domain Name System from ICANN (where it's been FOREVER) to the United Nations... thoughts? - http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/06/09/obama-administration-backs-plan-to-relinquish-internet-control.html - - -