Google to start country-specific censorship soon

Last week we wrote about Twitter’s rather controversial plans to begin censoring tweets in certain countries. Even though the move seems justified and will be executed in a way that looks (for now anyway) pretty fair, it’s still raised a lot of serious issues about online censorship and the control governments may have over restricting content.

Well now it seems that Google is looking to universally censor content too in the next few months. According to Techdows, if you visit an xxxx.blogspot.com URL in future you may find you’re redirected to a country specific URL instead.

For example, if you’re visiting a site from France, you’ll see xxxx.blogspot.fr instead of xxxx.blogspot.com in an in attempt from Google to limit the impact of any censored content.

A Blogger support page confirms what’s set to start happening and explains the reason for the changes:

“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 utilizing ccTLDs (country-code top level domains), 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.”

In theory the move to keep content available to the largest number of people seems to make sense, so is censoring content by country the way forward for online platforms, search engines and social networks in the future?

[Via Techdows Image via Guerretto]