Google Inc. is concerned about the growing desire of the governments to introduce censorship on the Internet. According to Google, over the past six months, they received more than one thousand requests from the governments of various countries to block certain elements of content. In particular governments ask for the restriction of access to the video on YouTube and search listings. The company reported that more than half of those requests were satisfied. List of queries was published as part of its bi-annual Global Transparency Report.
"Unfortunately, what we've seen over the past couple years has been troubling, and today is no different," Dorothy Chou, Google's senior policy analyst, said in a blog post. "When we started releasing this data, in 2010, we noticed that government agencies from different countries would sometimes ask us to remove political content that our users had posted on our services. We hoped this was an aberration. But now we know it's not."
According to Google statistics, the corporation received 461 court orders asking the removal of 6989 content items. 68% of those requirements were satisfied. In addition, the company also received 546 informal requests, complying with 46 percent of those requests. The statistics does not provide any data from Iran and China because these countries block content without notifying Google.
"Just like every other time, we've been asked to take down political speech," Chou said. "It's alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect -- western democracies not typically associated with censorship."
Among the take-down requests was the Spanish demand to remove 270 blogs and links to articles that contained criticism of public figures. The Web giant claimed that it also complied with the U.K. police requests for removal of five YouTube accounts that allegedly promoted terrorism.
