Invisible Barriers: Identifying restrictions affecting New Zealanders' access to the Internet

Abstract

The Internet is an important technology worldwide. People use the Internet for research, communication, shopping, entertainment, etc. In addition to these benefits, the Internet provides access to dangerous or illegal material. Because of this, some content and services may be blocked by governments, Internet Service Providers, organizations, or individuals. This blocking, whether for security or for network efficiency, has significant effects on people’s access to services and information, which may not be considered when implementing restrictions. Although studies have been conducted on Internet blocking in many countries, no one has yet examined what is being blocked in New Zealand. In this thesis, we measured the prevalence of Internet blocking in New Zealand and the reasons leading to a decision to block access to websites or Internet services. Although several different tools existed, they could not be used directly because they either concentrated on a narrow range of services or did not work in an environment where some services they depended upon were blocked. For this reason, we developed our own tool called WCMT based on the issues identified from previous tools. We conducted our study using WCMT in order to identify blocked websites and services in our quantitative analysis, complemented by interviews with key informants in our qualitative analysis