Rich Tramontana's paper points us to the study by Christopher Hunter who examined four of the commercially available Internet filtering programs, CYBERsitter, Cyber Patrol, Net Nanny, and Surf Watch.

Let's just look at what he found about overblocking. He found that CyberSitter blocked 15% of the non-objectionable sites. Cyber Patrol blocked 9% non-objectionable and Surf Watch blocked 7% of non-objectionable sites.

Does that sound unreasonable?  Well let's assume that the population of the world equates to the web and that people were web pages. The scope of what that means can be summed up by the diagram below that represents the fact that the entire population of all the countries in black would be invisible to the rest of the world (and each other).

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Last updated 3/21/06