9 ms·

Google Will Start Country-Specific Censorship for Blogs

38 points by beatle 15y ago

grecy 15y ago
Wow, the best thing about that article is the reference to http://google.com/ncr http://google.com/ncr (No country redirect) - finally a way to stop Google from re-directing me to whatever country I'm in.
DrCatbox 15y ago
Good bye Internet, it was nice to know you.
- getsat 15y ago
  It's not going away, it's just evolving (albeit in a less than stellar direction). An enterprising individual will be prepared to take advantage of the forthcoming restrictions and profit from them.
  - joe24pack 15y ago
    data and information bootleggers?
    - libraryatnight 15y ago
      We sell the truth.
drcube 15y ago
Didn't Google stop operating in China a few years ago because they'd rather lose business than support censorship? Then they said, "ah, fuck it, censorship's cool if your country has a billion ad-watching eyeballs". Now this is like the "censorship for everyone!" service pack. I think the answer is to make it easy for people to host their own content. Sort of an "anti-cloud". FreedomBox is a great concept, you guys that are better hackers than me (most of you) should find some way to contribute: http://freedomboxfoundation.org http://freedomboxfoundation.org
- Karunamon 15y ago
  >Didn't Google stop operating in China a few years ago because they'd rather lose business than support censorship? That's just the PR reason. The real reason is because they had recurring problems with local hackers getting into their systems.
  - powertower 15y ago
    I think it was more that Baidu.com is the state sponsored competitor to Google China, and pretty much have been wiping the floor with Google in that country. That move, claiming they were going to pull out of China because 12 email accounts were hacked (of human rights activists that weren’t even living in China) was pure PR that everyone was more than willing to lap up. Same thing with that "Microsoft is indexing our results". As soon as you looked at the details, the PR dissolved.
    - brandon 15y ago
      So the "hiybbprqag" thing was just a fluke, huh? Citation needed.
      - powertower 15y ago
        The IE's toolbar reports click-throughs on links, even on Google search results. Those click-throughs are weighted with 100s of other factors to establish a presence and relevance in Bing's index. A dozen Google engineers spent a considerable time and effort trying to insert terms into Bing's index using the IE toolbar. And all they could do was get a dozen terms through, nonsense terms such as "hiybbprqag", that had no other ranking factors. That last part is the important part (figure it out if you can). What I call this is spamming, with a 10% success rate (I think they tried to game 100 terms into Bing’s index). And then Google spined it for all it was worth. Reporting CTR on links is about as standard as it gets.
        brandon 15y ago
        So, per your admission, Microsoft's software monitors user behavior on a competitor's site (among others) and sends it back to the mothership, then they use that information to tune Bing's algorithm. How many of these data points do you think they get per day from all of their competitors? Millions? If you seriously don't see the problem with that, then it doesn't brook further discussion. If your competitors got a leg up on your business to any degree because they were able to post-process the results of your work, you'd be furious.
SoftwareMaven 15y ago
I hear about things like this and think we really need something like Diaspora: a unified, social interface being run on highly distributed systems. The benefits of things like Blogspot, Twitter and Facebook without the leverage points a few big companies ruling it all provide.
Karunamon 15y ago
Before the doom and gloomers start (looking below I'm a bit late, but anyways..), think about this from a practical perspective. We can assume two things as indisputable facts: 1) Google is a multinational company. 2) To operate in a given country necessitates complying with that country's laws. If a local country's laws say that you can't deny the holocaust (Germany) or speak ill of the king (Thailand) or talk about how corrupt the government is (Russia), or link to something that might be copyrighted (USA), or what have you, Google's options are limited to either compliance, or ceasing operations there. What do you think would happen if Google took a public hardass stance like "We refuse to censor user content under any circumstances"? Admirable, and that would make them a darling on the internet, but only as long as it took for the local apparatchik to note that the company is violating local laws, and shuts down their operations there or worse. Google's best bet in this case is exactly what they've done here - try to limit the spread of the local censorship from its local area. Just because Thailand's king gets easily butthurt is no reason for people outside of Thailand to suffer for the actions of a partially corrupt regime there.. If you have a better (and most importantly REALISTIC) idea, I'd love to hear it.
- anthonyb 15y ago
  Google's mission is to "organise the world's information". If that's the case, isn't allowing special interest groups the power to alter what information is presented a violation of that mission? "Organise the world's information, except where it makes some people butthurt" is a much less attractive proposition.
  - Karunamon 15y ago
    What's a worse blow to "organizing the world's information"? Removing a few things at the request of some government twits, or being shut down country by country?
- gbelote 15y ago
  I believe Google has a moral responsibility to fight censorship. I understand your stance, and it makes sense under the assumption that Google should do what's best for themselves (and shareholders), but that's wrong. Following local law doesn't absolve them of that evil. Edit: In response to having a better idea, Google isn't a powerless agent in this situation. They can take a hard stance without being completely cut out of that country. It may suck short-term, but it creates a better Internet long-term and that matters for them.
yanw 15y ago
Contrary to that headline it's actually more of a counter-censorship measure: http://support.google.com/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2402711 http://support.google.com/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an... By utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers. Content removed due to a specific country's law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD. So after a local authority demands that a blog post be removed, it will still be available at *.blogspot.com
- magicalist 15y ago
  Yeah, this article is pretty much just terrible reporting. If this tech reporter utilized their long term memory (or a search engine), they would remember everyone reporting on the google transparency report, which tells you exactly how much content each government has asked them to take down, and how many times they've complied with those requests. They would also have remembered the notes in that report that said that google was doing this exact same censorship to comply with eg Indian or German laws while not removing the content for the rest of the world http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/removals/ http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/... I mean, seriously? "Ebay thought that they could hide it, but hidden away in their TOS are rules for country-specific censorship, like hiding nazi memorabilia in german search results. It appears that Ebay snuck those terms in there 11 fucking years ago." Censorship: it's a really hard problem. Luckily we have tech reporters.

38 points by beatle 15y ago

grecy 15y ago

Wow, the best thing about that article is the reference to http://google.com/ncr http://google.com/ncr (No country redirect) - finally a way to stop Google from re-directing me to whatever country I'm in.

DrCatbox 15y ago

Good bye Internet, it was nice to know you.

getsat 15y ago
It's not going away, it's just evolving (albeit in a less than stellar direction). An enterprising individual will be prepared to take advantage of the forthcoming restrictions and profit from them.
- joe24pack 15y ago
  data and information bootleggers?
  - libraryatnight 15y ago
    We sell the truth.

drcube 15y ago

Didn't Google stop operating in China a few years ago because they'd rather lose business than support censorship? Then they said, "ah, fuck it, censorship's cool if your country has a billion ad-watching eyeballs". Now this is like the "censorship for everyone!" service pack. I think the answer is to make it easy for people to host their own content. Sort of an "anti-cloud". FreedomBox is a great concept, you guys that are better hackers than me (most of you) should find some way to contribute: http://freedomboxfoundation.org http://freedomboxfoundation.org

Karunamon 15y ago
>Didn't Google stop operating in China a few years ago because they'd rather lose business than support censorship? That's just the PR reason. The real reason is because they had recurring problems with local hackers getting into their systems.
- powertower 15y ago
  I think it was more that Baidu.com is the state sponsored competitor to Google China, and pretty much have been wiping the floor with Google in that country. That move, claiming they were going to pull out of China because 12 email accounts were hacked (of human rights activists that weren’t even living in China) was pure PR that everyone was more than willing to lap up. Same thing with that "Microsoft is indexing our results". As soon as you looked at the details, the PR dissolved.
  - brandon 15y ago
    So the "hiybbprqag" thing was just a fluke, huh? Citation needed.
    - powertower 15y ago
      The IE's toolbar reports click-throughs on links, even on Google search results. Those click-throughs are weighted with 100s of other factors to establish a presence and relevance in Bing's index. A dozen Google engineers spent a considerable time and effort trying to insert terms into Bing's index using the IE toolbar. And all they could do was get a dozen terms through, nonsense terms such as "hiybbprqag", that had no other ranking factors. That last part is the important part (figure it out if you can). What I call this is spamming, with a 10% success rate (I think they tried to game 100 terms into Bing’s index). And then Google spined it for all it was worth. Reporting CTR on links is about as standard as it gets.
      - brandon 15y ago
        So, per your admission, Microsoft's software monitors user behavior on a competitor's site (among others) and sends it back to the mothership, then they use that information to tune Bing's algorithm. How many of these data points do you think they get per day from all of their competitors? Millions? If you seriously don't see the problem with that, then it doesn't brook further discussion. If your competitors got a leg up on your business to any degree because they were able to post-process the results of your work, you'd be furious.

SoftwareMaven 15y ago

I hear about things like this and think we really need something like Diaspora: a unified, social interface being run on highly distributed systems. The benefits of things like Blogspot, Twitter and Facebook without the leverage points a few big companies ruling it all provide.

Karunamon 15y ago

Before the doom and gloomers start (looking below I'm a bit late, but anyways..), think about this from a practical perspective. We can assume two things as indisputable facts: 1) Google is a multinational company. 2) To operate in a given country necessitates complying with that country's laws. If a local country's laws say that you can't deny the holocaust (Germany) or speak ill of the king (Thailand) or talk about how corrupt the government is (Russia), or link to something that might be copyrighted (USA), or what have you, Google's options are limited to either compliance, or ceasing operations there. What do you think would happen if Google took a public hardass stance like "We refuse to censor user content under any circumstances"? Admirable, and that would make them a darling on the internet, but only as long as it took for the local apparatchik to note that the company is violating local laws, and shuts down their operations there or worse. Google's best bet in this case is exactly what they've done here - try to limit the spread of the local censorship from its local area. Just because Thailand's king gets easily butthurt is no reason for people outside of Thailand to suffer for the actions of a partially corrupt regime there.. If you have a better (and most importantly REALISTIC) idea, I'd love to hear it.

anthonyb 15y ago
Google's mission is to "organise the world's information". If that's the case, isn't allowing special interest groups the power to alter what information is presented a violation of that mission? "Organise the world's information, except where it makes some people butthurt" is a much less attractive proposition.
- Karunamon 15y ago
  What's a worse blow to "organizing the world's information"? Removing a few things at the request of some government twits, or being shut down country by country?
gbelote 15y ago
I believe Google has a moral responsibility to fight censorship. I understand your stance, and it makes sense under the assumption that Google should do what's best for themselves (and shareholders), but that's wrong. Following local law doesn't absolve them of that evil. Edit: In response to having a better idea, Google isn't a powerless agent in this situation. They can take a hard stance without being completely cut out of that country. It may suck short-term, but it creates a better Internet long-term and that matters for them.

yanw 15y ago

Contrary to that headline it's actually more of a counter-censorship measure: http://support.google.com/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2402711 http://support.google.com/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an... By utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers. Content removed due to a specific country's law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD. So after a local authority demands that a blog post be removed, it will still be available at *.blogspot.com

magicalist 15y ago
Yeah, this article is pretty much just terrible reporting. If this tech reporter utilized their long term memory (or a search engine), they would remember everyone reporting on the google transparency report, which tells you exactly how much content each government has asked them to take down, and how many times they've complied with those requests. They would also have remembered the notes in that report that said that google was doing this exact same censorship to comply with eg Indian or German laws while not removing the content for the rest of the world http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/removals/ http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/... I mean, seriously? "Ebay thought that they could hide it, but hidden away in their TOS are rules for country-specific censorship, like hiding nazi memorabilia in german search results. It appears that Ebay snuck those terms in there 11 fucking years ago." Censorship: it's a really hard problem. Luckily we have tech reporters.