[kictanet] Google Statistics on Government Censorship Requests

[McTim]

Walu,

Let's look at this critically;

On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 9:22 AM, Walubengo J <jwalu at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Check this out this interesting link
>
> http://www.google.com/governmentrequests/
>


First of all this is a great move by Google to increase transparency, no?

>
> Apparently Google is more government friendly than imagined - it tends to
> comply with most Government requests to block certain content/services...



Secondly, they don't block services IIUC, just contnet.

So let's examine the league leader, Brazil, with 291 removal requests.

291 removal requests

   - 82.5% of removal requests fully or partially complied with.


of these 291, 185 are by court order, so of course they "had" to do those
(for some value of "had").  So 106 were "voluntary", that is ~36%.

When you factor in the AUPs for orkut, blogger and youtube, one can assume
that at least some of the rest were violations of those AUPs.


   - 21 Blogger (court order)
   - 5 Blogger
   - 4 Gmail (court order)
   - 1 Google Suggest
   - 99 orkut (court order)
   - 119 orkut
   - 9 Web Search (court order)
   - 32 YouTube (court order)
   - 1 YouTube



> (this makes me wonder what their beef was with China).
>


Beef seemingly was that Google was willing to bend, but China pushed them to
the breaking point.  Plus the whole hacking thing.  I applaud Google for
their actions on China.


>
> So anyway, when Google complies with Govt requests, it means that when
> users in Kenya search for e.g.  kenyan-hate-speech related content they wont
> see that;



The map shows no requests from KE gov't.



> but if the same Kenyan does the same search from the US territory, they can
> see the very hate-speech that has been blocked within the Kenyan
> territory...
>


Is this actually the case?  If Google removes content, then it's not
"blocked" per country is it, it's removed for all.

If it was the case, one could easily use a proxy to access Google content
blocked to a certain set of IP address ranges.



>
> mmhhh...talk of technology controlling society.
>



I can't parse this one, sorry.

-- 
Cheers,

McTim
"A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route
indicates how we get there."  Jon Postel
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