14 DAY TRIAL // In an attempt to comply with a court order and block a single blog, some Argentinian ISPs have enacted a filter that actually makes over a million websites inaccessible to their customers.
The whole situation started with Argentina's National Telecommunications Commission (CNC) issuing a directive to ISPs to block access to leakymails.com and leakymails.blogspot.com as ordered by a judge.
Some service providers have decided to enforce the bans by blocking 216.239.32.2, an IP address associated with Google's Blogger service.
But while it does correspond to leakymails.blogspot.com, the same IP serves more than one million other blogs.
IP-based blocking is more efficient than DNS-based one, because users can't bypass it as easily. However, giving the large number of shared hosting services, IP filtering can have a bigger and undesired impact.
"IP blocking is a blunt method of filtering content that can erase from view large swaths of innocuous sites by virtue of the fact that they are hosted on the same IP address as the site that was intended to be censored," said EFF's Jillian York.
"One such example of overblocking by IP address can be found in India, where the IP blocking of a Hindu Unity website (blocked by an order from Mumbai police) resulted in the blocking of several other, unrelated sites," she noted.
Google announced that it is working with ISPs and other stakeholders in order to resolve this situation and restore access to the innocent websites.
"The blocking of websites, IP addresses, ports and network protocols is an extreme measure (similar, in some cases, to the closure of newspapers, radio or other media), and should be limited to sites or specific content, be proportionate and limited to the end sought to avoid unnecessary involvement of the various rights guaranteed to users," said Google's senior policy counsel for Latin America, Pedro Less Andrade, Senior Policy Counsel, Latin America [Google translation].