Error 451 approved to indicate web pages censorship

The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), the organization responsible for the final review of the Internet standards, has approved the new error 451 for the http protocol, the one used for websites. The purpose of the error 451 is to indicate contents not accessible for legal reasons. In essence, it’s a warning that a content has been censored. The code is inspired to the dystopian masterpiece “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury although in that case censorship concerned books.

Surfing the web, it sometimes happens that following a link we find an error code instead of the page we were looking for. Among the codes there are 404, page not found, and 403, access forbidden. In recent years the cases in which the access to web pages was denied for legal reasons increased but that’s not understandable through the codes returned to the surfers who tried to connect to it.

Already in 2012, Tim Bray, one of the authors of the XML specification, promoted the idea of ​​creating a specific code for censored pages. It took a long time but the idea of ​​the code 451 has now been officially approved. The formalities are not over yet but at this point just technical details are needed and the IESG chair Mark Nottingham stated that in fact you can start using it right now.

The code 451 will allow surfers to understand that the access to a web page is impossible for legal reasons, not because it’s restricted for other causes. That might not be sufficient for the authority that decides for the black-out of a web page might not allow its owner to use that code. In some cases ISPs are the ones forced to deny the access to certain web pages and their customers could keep on seeing the error 404 or 403.

Despite the possible limitations, the error 451 will help users to have an awareness of what contents are not available for legal reasons. They might wonder about the reasons of those black-outs and begin to assess whether they make sense or they’re censorship cases. I don’t expect an explosion of activism, on the contrary I’m sure that the vast majority of users will keep on using the Internet with very little awareness but if someone wakes up it will be a victory.

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