Google starting to censor blogs
Following Twitter’s decision last month to begin censoring the messages of users based on restrictions of their respective countries, Google has followed suit and announced that it will begin a similar practice with its own blogging service. - Blogger, the web-log service run by Internet giant Google, will begin censoring the personal posts of its users in order to comply with local laws rather than encouraging an internationally open Internet. While the company has previously allowed users of the World Wide Web to post wide-open opinions on its Blogger site, it will now allow individual jurisdictions to govern what can and can’t be posted on the Web. Under Google’s new policies, personal pages hosted on Blogger will be redirected to country-specific URLs, such as “.in” for India and “.au” for Australia. The company writes that “Migrating to localized domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law.” By implementing this, adds Google, “content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers." Specifically, they acknowledge that "Content [will be] removed due to a specific country's law.”