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"Whether in China or Chicago, we're now living in a world where access to information is partly controlled by private corporations, whose wish to 'comply with local regulation' may involve many layers of hidden decision-making about what we can see, read and hear. Lack of transparency in the process by which search results are produced means that we don't tend to see messages saying 'You have been banned by the government from visiting this site', or 'Someone will sue us if we let you see this.' Instead we get 'host not found' or no error message at all, just a timed-out connection or a crash we might attribute to some other cause. This is invisible censorship, hard to detect, hard to prove."

- Hari Kunzru, who's earlier written about the repressive regime in the Maldives, turns his sights on Internet censorship