Freedom on the Net Report is a project by Freedom House that works as a “collaborative effort between a small team of Freedom House staff and an extensive network of local researchers and advisors in 65 countries”. Since 2009, FOTNR has been performing country evaluations once a year and. As its name indicates, it publishes a report based on its “cutting-edge analysis, fact-based advocacy, and on-the-ground capacity building”, regarding different countries’ positions on internet access and censorship. The report labels the state of internet freedom in different countries as “free”, “partly free” and “not free”. Rankings, numerical scores and comparisons with previous years are part of the report, giving its vast audience a clear insight into a specific country’s online development or regressions over time. Their reports are the most accurate and complete in the world. Therefore they’re the most widely used resource by different entities such as worldwide activists, international development agencies, journalists, tech companies and many more.
The year of 2016 has seen quite the increase in online censorship. In a rank where the higher the result, the more repressive a country is, the award for the least online free country goes to China with an impressive score of 88 out of 100. China is known for being quite the online authoritarian country, with many restrictions on social media and other websites, all enforced by its Great Firewall. Therefore, it is no surprise that the Eastern country is the number one on the table. On the second and third places are Iran and Syriasharing the same score of 87. On the opposite end, Iceland, Estonia and Canada are the freest countries when it comes to online access, with scores of 6, 7 and 16.
These scores are attributed based on three indicators: obstacles to access, limits on content,and violations of user rights. These include different inner subjects, such as legal control over ISPs, filtering and blocking of specific websites, self-censorship often carried out by journalists, consequences of online speech or activities, and many more.
What started as an evaluation of 15 countries back in 2009 has grown out to become a detailed report on 65 nations in 2016, representing 87% of the world’s online population, which shows once again the importance of such worldwide noble cause. If you visit our country guides for instance, you can see that Best Reviews also uses this trustworthy project to give you the best possible insights in a specific country’s online regime.
As stated by the people behind it, “Freedom on the Net measures internet freedom in order to identify threats to online freedom and opportunities for positive change”. With this being said, we can only hope that the commitment to this cause increases, enabling reports to become even more extensive, covering more countries, hopefully resulting in different entities of the world making an effort to make the internet more open.
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