Telefonica Censorship?

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I’ve explained before how Telefonica’s net babysitter system, Canguro.net has (unwantedly) activated itself and prevented me from visiting some sites, but recently, something even more strange has been happening.

A couple of weeks ago, I needed to make an online purchase and it was something that a) I couldn’t get from another supplier, b) was essential and c) could only be purchased online. I was able to visit the site (based in the UK), but once I’d made my selection, if I clicked any links to attempt to proceed with my purchase, I could not do so. There were no error messages, I just got no response to clicks. Nothing happened. The page stayed where it was.

Because I absolutely could not fail to make the payment, just on a whim, I disconnected my connection (via Telefonica’s ADSL) and reconnected to the internet via a free dialup connection I use for emergencies, via Gonuts.

And, using that, I was able to complete the purchase without problem.

Today, I wanted to make a simple post to my Blogger blog. I attempted (via Telefonica’s ADSL) to reach the Blogger Dashboard, but all I kept getting was a timeout message, while I could reach other Google services OK.

Thought I’d try Gonuts and, I was able to get to Blogger on the first try.

Now I will admit that my technical knowledge is not enough to understand why this might be happening, but it feels like censorship, or that, for some reason (admittedly, I can’t see what that reason might be, other than potentially financial ones), Telefonica doesn’t want its users to visit certain sites.

Probably unsurprising: they’ve been accused of unfair practices before.

Unlike the Canguro problem, nothing comes up to tell me why this is happening; no errors, nothing that I could “switch off”. Anyone else suffered this?