China blocks all access to many sites, and it has begun selectively filtering content in real time - even as viewers seek access to it - and deleting individual links or Web pages that it finds offensive.

Add to that legislative insanity like the pending US Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which requires services to spy on their users and delete links to infringing content, and the problem becomes three times as hard.

A. We will delete links in your signature or message that we consider to be spam or advertising.

Just like ordinary files and folders, and can be used to delete symbolic links to files and directories.

Within the blogs, of course, Ice.com could merely delete links that lead anywhere but the store.

The site is run by the bakesperson, jutta, and a small group of volunteer moderators who can contribute ideas themselves and have rights to delete ideas, annotations and links provided by other users.

In a television interview with 3 News, Kim Dotcom denied being a "piracy king", and claimed that Megaupload had applied the provisions of the DMCA and went beyond it, by giving copyright holders direct rights to delete links.

In April 2013, TVMuse ceased to support user-submitted links and deleted such links retroactively, meaning that only paid services were included within the searchable database.