The internet becoming less open with more censorship

The common expectation is that democracy is increasing around the world, and associated with that is the concept of the internet being a beacon of openness, letting the global citizen access new from anywhere and on anything. Difficult to block, and complicated enough that slow-moving governments can only play catch-up. Well, was a good thought, and now onto reality. A study by the Open Net Initiative shows how wrong this belief is:

The level of state-led censorship of the net is growing around the world, a study of so-called internet filtering by the Open Net Initiative suggests.
The study of thousands of websites across 120 Internet Service Providers found 25 of 41 countries surveyed showed evidence of content filtering. Websites and services such as Skype and Google Maps were blocked, it said.
Such "state-mandated net filtering" was only being carried out in "a couple" of states in 2002, one researcher said. "In five years we have gone from a couple of states doing state-mandated net filtering to 25," said John Palfrey, at Harvard Law School.
Countries which carry out the broadest range of filtering included Burma, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen, the study said.

And of course you have China, which was not covered in the survey (since it was probably not considered safe to do a survey on censorship in China). China is the best example of how to beat the openness of the internet; it has an entire department dedicated to censorship, and they do a pretty effective job. In addition, the lure of China's size is that even supposed big corporations such as Yahoo, Google and Microsoft have buckled down. And you also have India, which at one time blocked off access to all the blogs on Google's blogger for a few days because of adverse comments. Of course, the power of democracy showed when people pressure and adverse comments forced the Indian Government to lift their blockage.