There are many situations where gov-distributed public information is legally required to be open access. Yet they block Tor.
To worsen matters, the general public largely and naively believes it’s correct to call something as “open access” when in fact there are access restrictions in place.
The resource should work like this:
- User supplies an URL
- Robot tries to access that page from a variety of different countries, residential and datacenter IPs, Tor, various VPNs, different user-agent strings, etc.
- Report is generated that reports the site as “openly accessible” if no obsticles (like 403s) were detected. Otherwise tags the site as “restricted access” and lists the excluded demographics of people.
The report should be dated and downloadable as PDF so that activists can send it to the org behind site with a letter saying: “your website is not open access -- please fix”.
This need somewhat aligns with the mission of the OONI project, but they are not doing this AFAICT.
Update
I just read an announcement about Belgium’s “open data” law, which is basically a summary. It said something like “there should be no unnecessary access restrictions”. I’m not sure to what extent that accurately reflects the law, but it’s an example of what one country considers “open”, fwiw. From there, I would say most Tor blockades are not necessary but rather some lazy sysadmin looking for an easy job. They of course would then like to argue that it’s “necessary” to keep the baddies out.
Update 2
The Open Knowledge Foundation Network defines open data to be completely free from restrictions:
https://okfn.org/en/library/what-is-open/