from the article:

“Iranian media didn’t comment on the competition Thursday apart from reporting its outcome. None reproduced the winning cartoons.”

sounds like even iranians didn’t care. i doubt this will hit the internet, although i’d like to see this cartoon.

Nah, my personal feeling is that its being hosted on some crappy Iranian server, and all the traffic its generating in the west is crushing the server.

Its as if McCrappy suddenly posted something that a million people wanted to see. The server would collapse under the load.

Its one of those odd paradoxes of the internet, if something garners a lot of attention it can actually be harder to see.

Additionally depending on how obscure the sites are, it can take a long time for google to get it high in the index. Google weights its search results based both on links TO, links FROM and the “reputability” of the source. My guess is again that anything out of Iran will not have a ton of cross posting with sites that are already highly indexed by google.

None of it however is an organized conspiracy or censorship, its just limitations of internet technology in an isolated region of the world.

As for the CNN article, it shows up fine for me… I don’t know if thats the one you said gave you a 404. I sort of assumed you meant the 404 was the one coming from Iran.

Another thing I forgot to mention earlier. Iran DOES filter net traffic, similarly to China, but not as prevelantly (largely because a very very small percentage of the iranian population is even online). Its also possible that its someone on the Iranian side controling flow. Likely once large amounts of traffic start coming into the country from outside, it sets off some warning bells and restricts a site that they fear might be pulling information from the west.

This is how China’s great firewall works. Part of it is a traffic monitor, that measures inbound traffic. Unusual patterns get flagged and then monitored more closely.

Again none of this is western censorship.