Amnesty International together with The Observer and Soda Creative launched a campaign called irrepressible.info against the increasing governmental censorship of the internet. The campaign asks governments to stop censoring websites, blocking emails or shutting down blogs and make an appeal to the big corporations to stop supporting these actions.

The Irrepressible.info website set up for the campaign includes a badge with parts of censored information and people are urged to send emails including this badge. Thus the censored information can be transmitted all around the globe. The website includes also a pledge that will be presented at the Internet Governance Forum meeting in Athens in November 2006 where governments and companies from all over the world will discuss the future of

The collective blockade of a corporate website in the context of a political event is not violence or coercion but legitimate free expression, a German Higher Regional Court in Frankfurt decided on 22 May.

The decision came almost five years after the online demonstration took place. The groups "Libertad" and "Kein Mensch ist illegal" (No Human is Illegal) had called for an online blockade of Lufthansa's website to protest against the company's participation in the deportation of asylum-seekers. With a script- (client-) based distributed denial of service attack, the Lufthansa web servers were supposed to be blocked during the annual company's shareholders assembly on 20 June 2001. Though Lufthansa was mostly able to adapt to the protest by renting more bandwidth for that day, the event created significant public interest.

The European Commission proposal to regulate commercial audio and video broadcasts over the Internet and mobile phones, continues to be strongly opposed by supporters of free speech, but also tranditional and new media providers.

At the meeting of Education, Youth and Culture Council in Brussels (18-19 May 2006) the proposal for a directive amending the Directive on the pursuit of television broadcasting activities was discussed. The debate covered, in particular, the following issues in relation with the proposed directive: the appropriateness and the sustainability of the distinction between linear and non-linear services; the common rules applying to both categories of services; the extent of the modernization and simplification of television advertising and teleshopping rules.

Reporters Without Borders - Internet Annual report 2006 : Everyone's interested in the Internet - especially dictators

The Internet has revolutionised the world's media. Personal websites, blogs and discussion groups have given a voice to men and women who were once only passive consumers of information. It has made many newspaper readers and TV viewers into fairly successful amateur journalists. Dictators would seem powerless faced with this explosion of online material. How could they monitor the e-mails of China's 130 million users or censor the messages posted by Iran's 70,000 bloggers? The enemies of the Internet have unfortunately shown their determination and skill in doing just that. China was the first repressive country to realise that the Internet was an extraordinary tool of free expression and quickly assembled the money and

After many complaints from Russia, the Swedish authorities closed up on 5 May, Kavkazcenter.com, a Chechen separatist Web site that allegedly encouraged terrorism. The police arrived at PRQ Web hosting company in Stockholm with a search warrant and confiscated two servers.

The Finish owner of the servers, Mikael Storsjo, told Swedish news agency TT that the Russian embassy had filed a police complaint that the site incited rebellion for an attack in Nalchik by suspected Islamic extremists in October last year. "I see this as an outrage. I don't agree with what's written on the website but I respect their right to free speech." said Mr. Storsjo.

The Web site has moved around on numerous servers in the Nordics and Baltic countries during the last years and has previously been shut down by

The first-instance court of Hamburg gave its final ruling on the liability of forum comments, stating that moderators of internet forums are liable for content posted on their sites.

Initially, the legislation held forum providers liable for illegal content they had knowledge about and there was no obligation for them to search for such content. This interpretation was now overruled by the Hamburg court who considered providing forums as a business operation. Therefore forum providers should be able to have sufficient staff and means to check out comments on their forums. As the court stated, in case they cannot operate accordingly, “they either have to expand their in-house resources or ... reduce the scope of their business operations,"

The case originating the ruling was that of a forum member of German news

Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and all forms of Discrimination: Comprehensive Implementation of and follow-up to the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action - Report of the Intergovernmental Working Group on the effective implementation of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action on its fourth session.

The report contains the all presentations, discussions, conclusions from the Chair and final recommendations from the High Level Seminar on Racism and the Internet that took place during 16-17 January 2006.

Full report (20.03.2006)
http://www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/chr/docs/62chr/E.CN.4.2006.18.pdf

EDRI-gram : Combating Racism on Internet
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number4.2/internetracism

As a result of the agreement signed between the French ISPs and the Ministry of the Family on 16 November 2005, starting with 1 April 2006, most of the ISPs started providing a free of charge parental control software to their subscribers.

The agreement signed between ISPs and the French authorities has followed strong protests relayed in the media, after EDRi-member IRIS unveiled in September 2005 the intention of the government to impose by law "by default" filtering by ISPs for the purpose of parental control. After this, the intentions of the government have been downsized excluding " by default" parental control installed by the ISP. The current agreement still raises many concerns, especially since no real information is provided on the software and its criteria.

Starting with 1 April 2006 new subscribers will have the software included