Unveiling Internet Censorship: Analysing the Impact of Nation States' Content Control Efforts on Internet Architecture and Routing Patterns (2402.19375v1)

Abstract: Heightened interest from nation states to perform content censorship make it evermore critical to identify the impact of censorship efforts on the Internet. We undertake a study of Internet architecture, capturing the state of Internet topology with greater completeness than existing state-of-the-art. We describe our methodology for this, including the tooling we create to collect and process data from a wide range of sources. We analyse this data to find key patterns in nation states with higher censorship, discovering a funnelling effect wherein higher Internet censorship effort is reflected in a constraining effect on a state's Internet routing architecture. However, there are a small number of nation states that do not follow this trend, for which we provide an analysis and explanation, demonstrating a relationship between geographical factors in addition to geopolitics. In summary, our work provides a deeper understanding of how these censorship measures impact the overall functioning and dynamics of the Internet.