An image from the controversial copyright-focused COICA bill (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — In a post made this week , the Electronic Freedom Foundation ( www.eff.org ) denounced MasterCard’s support for the passage of the currently-in-the-works Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, which it refers to – presumably glibly – as the “Internet Censorship and Copyright Bill.” While the news of MasterCard’s support for the bill – which could require the credit card company to suspend its services to certain websites considered within the bill’s parameters to be threats for copyright infringement – was first reported in early December, the opinion published this week is based in part on the WikiLeaks saga in late 2010, which saw many service providers shutting down services to the whistle blowing website as a kind of pre-emptive measure. The EFF post calls out other service providers, including web hosts and domain registrars

Can the Government Really Ban Porn? Tuesday, December 21, 2010, 11:53:15 AM UK Culture Minister, Ed Vaizey, yesterday announced the Governments plans to talk with Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) in a bid to make them impose an age-verification scheme on internet porn. In an interview with the Sunday Times, Vaizey said that he was “hoping [ISPs] will get their acts together so we don’t have to legislate, but we are keeping an eye on the situation and we will have a new communications bill in the next couple of years”.

Google Now Says Search Outage Due To Censorship Google’s temporary search engine outage Tuesday was originally thought to have been the result of an internal glitch, but Google now says it was due to censorship by the Chinese government. The outage affected users in China who attempted to visit Google.com.hk as well as Google.com. Google initially attributed the outage to its usage of the search parameter “gs_rfai,” the “rfa” portion of which is linked to Radio Free Asia, which has long been inaccessible in China

The European commissioner for home affairs, Cecilia Malmström, is proposing a directive this week to block websites that show images of child abuse.

Online Censorship Is Getting Craftier Repressive regimes have stepped up efforts to censor the Internet and jail dissidents, Reporters Without Borders said in a study out Thursday. China, Iran and Tunisia, which are on the group’s “Enemies of the Internet” list, got more sophisticated at censorship and overcoming dissidents’ attempts to communicate online, said Reporters Without Borders’ Washington director, Clothilde Le Coz