Internet Service Providers and online platforms like WordPress.com are increasingly facing demands to block access to URLs in different countries. These orders can come as the result of court decisions (in the case of the UK and Turkey), or directly from governmental authorities (in the case of Russia or Georgia) and are usually directed at content that governments find illegal or objectionable.
Before now, there has been no standard error message that is both machine-readable and also explains to visitors the reason that the site is unavailable.
Default messages like the infamous ‘Error 404 – Page not found’ or its close cousin, ‘Error 403 – Forbidden’ strike us as inadequate for situations where sites are unavailable for legal reasons. Enter the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). They have approved a new HTTP error status code: Error 451, named after Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel ‘Fahrenheit 451’. This development comes after 2 years of campaigning by groups such as the Open Rights Group and Article 19.
We are strongly opposed to Internet censorship, and believe that geoblocking is both inappropriate and an ineffective remedy for controversial speech. The introduction of the new HTTP error code is a welcome one, and we have gladly adopted it on WordPress.com. The error code will be returned to visitors from those countries where we have been forced to block websites for legal reasons, and allow statistics to be gathered on the number of these kind of blocks worldwide more easily.
For more information on the requests we receive from governments, please see our latest Transparency Report.
‘451 unavailable’ header image modified from original logo by the Open Rights Group under CC-BY-SA 4.0 Licence.
Transparency Report 