In contrast to the proxy servers in the UAE and Singapore, which filter out banned sites, Saudi Arabia has chosen a completely different route. Initially all sites are banned until officials have inspected them and placed them on an 'approved and desirable' list. That brings up the question as to what constitutes desirable. Analysts say it is safe to assume that pornographic, political, and anti-Islamic sites will be excluded, but one can only wonder what will happen regarding news and market information sites. It would be extremely difficult to partially ban CNN, for example, they say.
Search engines are another problem.
Allowing access to AltaVista, also allows access to Usenet. The main problem that censors face is that information is cross-linked at lower levels, so a site that is initially approved could conceivably obtain data from another site that is not. E-mail should theoretically be easier to monitor since it is a text message with an identifiable sender and receiver. However, the advent of direct-marketing techniques on the Internet has given birth to numerous tools for making a message untraceable. Factor in encryption techniques which manage to hide themselves, and the Saudi Internet's overseers have a major problem again, say analysts.