Abstract

The widespread take-up of Internet technologies from the mid-1990s has proven challenging to nation states that seek to limit access to ideas, information or images that the political class considers dangerous or inappropriate for the general population. As a largely deterritorialized technology, the Internet allows access to material that circumvents national legislatures and ignores local ratings systems and in so doing facilitates all kinds of inter-cultural and transnational flows of communication. Different countries have different sensitivities regarding the kinds of material that should not be freely available to their citizens and although the entry of such material is closely scrutinized at land borders, maintaining virtual barriers is much more difficult.