Country: USA

Internet censorship in the United States
is the suppression of information published or viewed on the Internet in the United States. Personal Internet access in the US is not subject to technical censorship but can be penalized by law for violating the rights of others. Programs such as content-control software are sometimes used within institutions such as businesses, libraries, schools, and government offices. Though most online expression is protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, laws such as those concerning libel, intellectual property, and pornography still determine how and if certain content can be published online.

Internet content that violates U.S. law and is physically hosted in the United States may be removed through legal processes. For example, pirated films available on a website hosted in California could be targeted by the U.S. legal system. Similar content hosted in another country could not.

Such content removals are routine and are usually not broadly labeled as government “censorship”. However, controversial cases have occurred that some argue cross the line into censorship.

In February 2008, the Bank Julius Baer vs. Wikileaks lawsuit prompted the United States District Court for the Northern District of California to issue a permanent injunction against the website Wikileaks’ domain name registrar. The result was that Wikileaks could not be accessed through its web address. This elicited accusations of censorship and resulted in the Electronic Frontier Foundation stepping up to defend Wikileaks. After a later hearing, the injunction was lifted.

Block against Cuban websites
In March 2008, a New York Times story mentions that eNom is known to disable domain names which appear on a US Treasury Department blacklist.It describes eNom’s disabling of a European travel agent’s Web sites advertising travel to Cuba, which appeared on a U.S. Treasury Department list published by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). The article’s sources use words varying from “scandal” to “legally required” to describe “how Web sites owned by a British national operating via a Spanish travel agency can be affected by U.S. law”, especially when the operation is as “mysterious” as that of the OFAC list.

source wikipedia.com