New Delhi: In the face of ongoing pressure from different governments on Google to censor content on the many services that the search engine giant operates, Google is taking a middle path.
Google's popular blogging platform Blogger has started to redirect blogs to localised domains, also known as country-code top level domain (ccTLD). This means that if you are accessing a blog hosted on Google's Blogger service, it will redirect to an address with a ccTLD corresponding to the country a user is accessing the blog from, instead of the default '.com'.
For example, if you try accessing the official Google blog http://googleblog.blogspot.com from India it will automatically redirect to http://googleblog.blogspot.in/. Similarly, a user accessing the same blog from Australia will be taken to http://googleblog.blogspot.com.au
Since Google is continuously flooded with removal requests from around the world, the company is attempting to comply with local laws and at the same time making the content available to users from the rest of the world.
"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, 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," Google explains the reasons behind the move on a Blogger help page.
This will, however, not affect blogs that are powered by Blogger but use their own custom domains such as Postsecret.com.
This move by Google comes close on the heels of the recent announcement by Twitter that it may allow country-specific censorship of tweets that could be in contravention to local laws.
Twitter's censorship plans met with protest from users around the world. But Twitter CEO Dick Costolo sought to calm the global outrage describing the move as "a thoughtful and honest approach to doing this and it's in fact being done in a way that's forward-looking."
Google says it is trying to minimise the search engine optimization impact can the redirection of Blogspot blogs to ccTLDs may cause.
Users who want to access the .com version of the blog, say from India, can do so by entering a specially formatted 'NCR' URL. NCR stands for 'No Country Redirect.'
For example, if a user wishes to go to http://googleblog.blogspot.com from India and does not want to be redirected to http://googleblog.blogspot.in, she can enter http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ncr on her Web browser's address bar. This prevents the geo-based redirection.
Union IT Minister Kapil Sibal had recently triggered a debate by suggesting that Internet companies should pre-screen content.
Executives from Google and Facebook and 19 other companies have been ordered to appear in person in a Delhi court on March 13 for allegedly hosting obscene and objectionable content.
In June 2006 Indian Internet service providers in an effort to block a few 'erring' blogs and on orders from the government, denied access to the entire blogspot.com domain. The Indian Internet community rose in protest and the block was later lifted.
As the spread and the influence of the Internet is increasing in countries such as India, censorship attempts by authorities have also been rising. Therefore to mitigate unpleasant encounters with local laws Google and Twitter are attempting a workaround. Other big Internet companies may soon follow suit.
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