Despite being proclaimed as a truly democratic and open medium, this week sees another instance of web censorship hit much closer to home. Yesterday the New York Times had a leading article entitled Details Emerge In British Terror Case which was unavailable to users from the UK, who were presented with an brief explanation when they tried to view the report.

This Article Is Unavailable
On advice of legal counsel, this article is unavailable to readers of nytimes.com in Britain. This arises from the requirement in British law that prohibits publication of prejudicial information about the defendants prior to trial.

This is nothing compared to the actions of Google and other search companies in regards to censoring, particularly of the chinese market, but is possibly one of the first cases to really bring the issue home to the UK.

Follow up:

In China, the search engines have been accused of blocking specific keywords. As I understand this has been to avoid large fines from the Chinese government, but there are suggestions that these companies should pull out of the market in China altogether in protest if they will not be allowed to operate uncensored services.

Today the New York Times ran a story about its own self-censorship of reports on the terror case explaining how they had to adapt their technology to manage this. The method for detecting a user's geographical location is not 100% effective though and a determined reader wouldn't have too much difficulty spoofing their country, which begs the question: even if it were desirable, is it really possible to control the dispersion of news across borders? (Hat tip to Pete Baker on picking this up).