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You seem to view anything that removes anything as censorship, which is pretty pure nonsense. It's only in your interestingly rewritten definitions of censorsh

You seem to view anything that removes anything as censorship, which is pretty pure nonsense. It's only in your interestingly rewritten definitions of censorship that this is censorship. IE censorship is defined by the OED as: "The suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security." This is exactly none of those things. No book, film, news, etc is being prohibited. At all. The only thing being prohibited are illegal downloads of them. The book, film, news, etc it links to are still available legally! webster is similar. It would be censorship if the material those links went to was banned. But it isn't. The only ban is on accessing them without paying. (Banning Gambling is also not censorship) I'm also pointing out it's an incredibly clear webstore TOS violation. Like, the TOS literally prohibits this, and has forever. So saying "we have no idea what happened" is instead a distraction. I'm not sure what spine you expect them to regrow. You also seem to not distinguish at all between government censorship (which this is not) and private actor censorship (which this is by your definition of censorship, but not by just about any dictionary). So i'm not sure it's worth trying to have a meaningful discussion here.

mindslight 8y ago
Abstract "censorship" always has a concrete and more purposeful justification. And that justification is always aligned with the rules of the time, or said censorship could not have happened. So it's not particularly enlightening to follow the logic of that justification! This obviously only could have occurred because it made sense in Google land. So yes, no meaningful discussion can happen with someone who insists on that paradigm, just like no meaningful discussion can occur with Google itself - it followed its rules, and therefore acted correctly. Back to the big picture (and putting aside whether Portugal's block list is itself censorship). Here we've got a Free app which advocates breaking the law - essentially political speech analogous to a poster advocating ways of dodging the draft. And it has been made significantly harder to obtain, due to the deliberate choice of a powerful organization. Yes this does certainly sound like censorship to me! Not that there's much legal remedy, or seemingly even a public-relations-based one any more. So really it's that for those of us who believe in the Internet (ie unfettered end to end communications), but perhaps have been giving Google a MITM-pass due to technological constraints, this is just another example for why we need to collectively wise up and get the fuck away from Google.

mindslight 8y ago

Abstract "censorship" always has a concrete and more purposeful justification. And that justification is always aligned with the rules of the time, or said censorship could not have happened. So it's not particularly enlightening to follow the logic of that justification! This obviously only could have occurred because it made sense in Google land. So yes, no meaningful discussion can happen with someone who insists on that paradigm, just like no meaningful discussion can occur with Google itself - it followed its rules, and therefore acted correctly. Back to the big picture (and putting aside whether Portugal's block list is itself censorship). Here we've got a Free app which advocates breaking the law - essentially political speech analogous to a poster advocating ways of dodging the draft. And it has been made significantly harder to obtain, due to the deliberate choice of a powerful organization. Yes this does certainly sound like censorship to me! Not that there's much legal remedy, or seemingly even a public-relations-based one any more. So really it's that for those of us who believe in the Internet (ie unfettered end to end communications), but perhaps have been giving Google a MITM-pass due to technological constraints, this is just another example for why we need to collectively wise up and get the fuck away from Google.