A Bestiary of Blocking: The Motivations and Modes behind Website Unavailability

This paper examines different reasons for web inaccessibility. Prior work on accessibility mostly focuses on censorship by nation-states. We look at three forms of server-side blocking: blocking visitors from the EU to avoid GDPR compliance, blocking based upon the visitor’s country, and blocking due to security concerns. We argue that these and other forms of blocking warrant more research.