2025/10/21 by Yong Zhang, Zhang, Yong, Nishanth Sastry +1
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Access to information #Censorship #Component (thermodynamics) #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #Cybersecurity and Cyber Warfare Studies #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Retrieval (cs.IR) #Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting #Internet access #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Politics #Privacy, Security, and Data Protection #Social and Information Networks (cs.SI) #The Internet
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2510.18394
published in arXiv (Cornell University) (Cornell University)
openalex publication_date 2025/10/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Undoubtedly, the Internet has become one of the most important conduits to information for the general public. Nonetheless, Internet access can be and has been limited systematically or blocked completely during political events in numerous countries and regions by various censorship mechanisms. Depending on where the core filtering component is situated, censorship techniques have been classified as client-based, server-based, or network-based. However, as the Internet evolves rapidly, new and sophisticated censorship techniques have emerged, which involve techniques that cut across locations and involve new forms of hurdles to information access. We argue that modern censorship can be better understood through a new lens that we term chokepoints, which identifies bottlenecks in the content production or delivery cycle where efficient new forms of large-scale client-side surveillance and filtering mechanisms have emerged.