Why Do People Search for Free Proxies

There are many, many people, that spend much of their time searching for free proxies on the internet. One reason is due to the way the internet has developed over the last few years. You see all that wonderful content, all the media sites, the entertainment, politics, social networking sites are great for users but not everyone wants to allow you unrestricted access. There are both legitimate and not so legitimate reasons, people who seek to block access to specific websites.

In Turkey lots of web sites get blocked based on religious or cultural objections, alternative religions or lifestyle choices are blocked by the disapproving state. They’re not alone, we’ve all heard of the great firewall of China but many, many countries are enacting some sort of internet censorship including democracies like Australia. Of course many of these web sites are just plain criminal, but in other countries it’s not so straight forward – should Gay websites be banned in Turkey for instance, political and social networking sites in Iran – perhaps not quite so simple.

Using proxies enable some people to bypass these blocks depending on the technology that is in place. A simple reason is employers have to prevent access to sites like Youtube and facebook to make sure some work actually gets done! It’s easy to lose several hours at a time on these web sites if you’re not careful so you can have some sympathy for the employers. Most free proxies though rarely bypass such restrictions despite what the websites tell you. The reason is that most employers block these sites using content filters which actually look instead the content of the web request that is sent from your computer. In this case using a proxy server will not help at all, the URL is read ‘on the wire’ so a whether a proxy server is used is irrelevant.

Perhaps the biggest requirement of all this searching though is searching for country specific proxy servers. Users will search for a UK Proxy in order to avoid the restrictions on accessing BBC Iplayer for instance. Surfers outside the UK are blocked but not if they use a UK based proxy server. The same happens for people searching for a French proxy usually so they can access one of the French media sites such as M6 Replay.

You can get passed all these restrictions, there are a multitude of problems with free proxies though, you have to search every time you want to use one as they rarely last more than a few hours. If you use the web based proxies they’ll be unusable for most uses other than very basic web browsing, anything else will be much too slow to stand.

One thing is for sure though whilst countries and employers keep blocking access to web sites, people will keep looking for solutions like proxies to bypass these restrictions.