Internet Filtering in China in 2004 2005 

conventional wisdom about China's blocking practices, and lends support for our conclusion that China's 

filtering has become more finely targeted over time. 

4. Domain specific Blocking

Our in state testing of the long list included multiple URLs in the same domain   for example, 

http://www.gluckman.com/DalaiLama.html and http://www.gluckman.com/Tianan.html.  Filtering is 

often done at the domain level; thus, our previous studies generally find binary results: a domain is either 

completely accessible or completely inaccessible (with the frequent exception of domains that host a wide 

variety of content by different authors, such as free web hosts or blogging domains).  Domains with a 

mixture of accessible and inaccessible URLs can help us understand the technical means employed to 

filter and can offer more detail on what content is targeted for filtering. 

From a technical perspective, different results for sites in a single domain can result from either 

an inconsistent filtering system that does not subject all Web site requests to the same standards or the 

targeting of very specific content.  Our results do not yet allow us to answer definitively which of these 

answers applies in the case of China. 

a. Partially and Completely Inaccessible Domains 

We tested 2 or more URLs for 1091 domains; our in country testers could not access at least one 

URL in 297 of these domains (27%).  Of these 297, all URLs tested were inaccessible in 278 domains 

(94%), and 19 (6%) had both accessible and inaccessible URLs.  Since the URLs we tested resulted from 

searches on keywords identified as potentially sensitive to the Chinese state, it is possible that other, 

untested URLs within these domains with non sensitive content would have been available. 

i. Heavily Tested Domains 

The following domains had over 20 URLs tested, all of which were inaccessible in our testing. 

Figure 19   Heavily Tested Domains With No Accessible URLs 

Domain 

Inaccessible 

URLs 

http://news.bbc.co.uk 

81 

http://www.geocities.com 

55 

http://www.epochtimes.com 

46 

http://www.boxun.com 

44 

http://www.peacehall.com 

37 

http://www.voanews.com 

29 

http://www.rfa.org 

28 

http://www.democracy.org.hk 

23 

http://www.freechina.net 

21 

http://xinsheng.net 

20 

39