Estonia ranked No. 1 in the world by Internet freedom

The weakness in this report is that Estonia does censor the internet. If you are in Estonia, and you try to go to an online gambling site that does not have a gaming license for Estonia, then you get redirected to a the Estonian Tax authority's webpage instead.

In other words, the government has provided a list of blocked sites to all internet providers, and they block access to it. No country that blocks access to _any_ content should rank #1 on this list.

This is a slippery slope -- the mechanism is in place and the Estonian government can now easily ask providers to censor any other content they don't like.

By comparison, in the US, this practice is not followed. Even though online gambling sites are not legal in the US, you can still go to the sites. Instead, they block the funding of such activities, as credit card companies won't let you use the cards to spend at gambling sites.

One article I read said the main reason the US did not get #1 is that high-speed internet access is expensive or impossible to obtain in rural areas of the country. This is true, and there are plans to improve this. It's simply a very costly endeavor due to the country's size.

The worst thing is that this type of censorship is meaningless, as this so called "access blocking" by manipulating DNS entries can be bypassed with ease through proxies, vpn, freenet, you name it.

Unless one would implement deep package inspection (which would Estonia let plump instantly in the ranks of Syria, Bahrain and China), all it does is leaving a bitter taste on internet freedom without the wanted benefits on it.

They tried the same in Germany by blocking websites that contain child pornography (like they already do in Australia, Sweden and the UK, for instance, where strange to say somehow again and again are websites blocked nothing to do with it), what sounds at first like a heroic act.

The thing is that this doesn't dry out such criminal milieus, but just "blackens" the black holes of the internet where such sick stuff is hosted on (well known St. Petersburg and the Netherlands to be some of the places, as F-Secure and other labs of security software found out last year), just like Iran is blacken every infamous magazine imported to their country (by handicraft with eddings, btw).

If one wants to fight the worst crimes in this world and money laundering, it is not necessary to do this with help of censorship.

We just need to dry up the profiteers financially, by disconnecting them from the money supply and maybe someone should impose to investigate certain data centers in the Netherlands, for instance, where most of online gambling sites worldwide are hosted also.