I've been doing research on website filtering as part of my cyber-security research paper for my Networking class.
While browsing, I've stumbled upon an article regarding Pennsylvania's attempt to block pornography sites back in 2003/2004. At first, I didn't know blocking websites at state level was possible since the US' network infrastructure is highly centralized (especially ISPs with a national footprint). This was considered unconstitutional thus was not implemented.
However, I also found an article about Quebec's plan to block gambling websites but that was also struck down due to communications being a responsibility of the Canadian federal government.
Speaking of Quebec, I've also read an article about retailers blocking traffic from Quebec since they did not have a French version of their site. What baffles me is that GeoLocation in IP address are sometimes incomplete (no state/city/etc) and/or ISPs would borrow IP addresses intended for another locality to make up for the shortage.
Which leads me to this question: can websites/services be blocked at a state/provincial level? I don't exactly know how ISP infrastructures are setup in the US. Actually, I'm not familiar with how ISPs setup their networks, although I believe it should be the same as how internal corporate networks are setup, but at a larger scale. For the opposite (websites blocking certain states), I think it's possible, but the inaccuracy of IP addresses pretty much defeats the point in my opinion.
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