The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) has made a right mess of the opening day of its meeting in Egypt.

Already under fire for holding the forum in Egypt, which banged up a blogger for four years, the group also made a truly ham-fisted attempt to censor debate at the meeting.

A security guard was told to remove a poster created by the OpenNet Initiative which included the incendiary line: "China's famous 'Great Firewall of China' is one of the first national Internet filtering systems."

The risk of this outrageous piece of entirely unstartling information upsetting a Chinese delegate was presumably behind the move.

Unfortunately the incident was filmed and later put on YouTube.

So now a poster, which stated the bleedin' obvious, will now be seen by most of the internet rather than a few dozen policy wonks at a faraway conference. Really good work there chaps.

Lobby group OpenNet said it would be writing to the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights to complain.

In other news the European Commission welcomed Icann's adoption of non-Latin top level domain names. ®