Idea: Proxy Widget to Make Every blog and web site a force for freedom

What if every blog and web site could be a proxy server helping people with censored access to the internet to see everything? What if all you had to do was install a little swatch of code on your site and voila–you could help advance the cause of an open, uncensored internet?

There are these cool web sites with the uncool name proxy servers that permit people who are stuck behind censoring firewalls at work, or in their own countries, to see things that the authorities don’t want them to see. The classic example of such censorship is the Great Firewall of China, which blocks any site mentioning the 1989 Tiannanmen Square protests and many other things. Can’t see Youtube because it is censored at work? No problem, just hop on to a proxy server like such as Try2StopMe or YouHide, enter the Youtube URL you want, and bingo, you’re off and running.

The proxy will work until the censor discovers it and blocks it. Proxy servers succeed through obscurity. The organizations that want to censor internet access — governments, employers, schools — are in a game of proxy server whack-a-mole to knock out the proxies one by one.

There is a danger in proxy servers, too. How does one know they are legit? They could just as easily be watching your every click.

So here’s my idea: a swatch of code I or anyone could install on my site that would turn it into a proxy server, and, a means for verifying its safety and legitimacy in a distributed manner that couldn’t be faked, perhaps displaying a small flag as verification. The distribution of these proxies would have to be so vast that censoring authorities simply couldn’t keep up. Every news web site, every blog, every e-commerce site could join in the openness cause. If millions of sites could serve as gateways to an uncensored internet, the only way to censor would be to block the entire internet.

Would this sort of proxy widget even be possible?

Administrative Update, 4/13/2010: Comments are closed, as the content of this post proved to be catnip to comment spammers.