GoKawiilItaly Blocks Reproductive Health Websites Women on Web (WoW) and Women Help Women (WHW)
In this report, we share OONI data on the blocking of the Women on Web (WoW) and Women Help Women (WHW) websites in Italy. These websites facilitate access to reproductive health care and offer abortion information.
Key findings
Our analysis of OONI data collected from OONI Probe tests of Women on Web ( www.womenonweb.org ) and Women Help Women ( womenhelp.org ) in Italy between 1 November 2025 and 1 June 2026 indicates that at least 6 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) – including several of Italy’s largest networks by end-user population – began blocking access to both domains in mid-February 2026 through DNS tampering.
Specifically, key findings include:
Introduction
Since 2012, the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) builds free software tools and hosts open data to empower the public to monitor, document, and respond to internet censorship around the world. OONI is a nonprofit organization registered in Italy that operates globally.
Having pioneered crowdsourced methods for measuring internet censorship, OONI is a leader in the network measurement world. We won the 2012 Access Now Freedom of Expression Tech Prize for actionable ideas on how to use information technology to promote and enable human rights and deliver social good. More recently, we received the Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI) 2023 Community Award.
Overall, we measure internet services in a crowdsourced way through network-level experiments run by OONI Probe app users in around 170 countries each month (including Italy). Each of these experiments has a different methodology, all of which are publicly documented. Since these experiments are run from local network vantage points, they offer unique insights into the accessibility or blocking of internet services at the edge of the network. We publish OONI Probe test results (“measurements”) from around the world as open data in real-time.
In June 2026, we collaborated with Women on Web (WoW), a feminist nonprofit that facilitates access to abortion information and care, on a joint research report documenting the blocking of Women on Web domains around the world. We previously collaborated with Women on Web on a 2019 report documenting the blocking of Women on Web in several countries (Brazil, Iran, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and Türkiye) based on OONI data. This report was the first of its kind, as no other digital abortion providers had been known to face as many government-ordered blockages. In 2020, we also documented the blocking of Women on Web in Spain. In the years following these reports, Women on Web’s work on fighting the censorship of their website has escalated to multiple national court battles.
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