Blogger.com's New Takedown Policy Thwarts Censorship

[snakeair]

Anyone use Google's blogging service? Check out this blog post.

Google's Blogger has found a way to handle local government takedown requests similar to the way Twitter now does. It will now start redirecting readers to country-specific top-level domains (TLD) instead of the usual blogspot.com domain. It does so based on the location of the user's IP address, just as many other Google services do. This gives Google the "flexibility" to comply with removal requests according to local laws.

But don't start your knee-jerking just yet (as so many did with Twitter's local compliance policy). This is a way around censorship. Would you rather Blogger and Twitter be blocked in some countries outright? As Google Operating System (the original purveyor of this fine story) points out, the content at the "blogspot.com" domain will continue to exist. "Content removed due to a specific country's law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD," Google explains in its support document.

More to read at: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...censorship.php

Your thoughts on this news?

[stone]

http://[blogname].blogspot.com/ncr
Hmm...
How many people are going to be sufficiently web-savvy to use that? How long b4 the country in question puts a stop to that as well?

It doesn't take long for schools and such to block various Proxy work-arounds that students attempt to employ to visit banned sites, this little scheme sounds like it's the beginning of a long slide down a short slippery slope toward compliance with censorship.

[JPC-Sabrina]

It is always astounding that once a mechanism is found to effectively silence the voice that means to someone's end can accelerate at an alarming rate.

[ScriptMan]

I read the linked article and while I live in America, I find censorship a little hard to swallow but I also consider it an acceptable compromise. Agree or not it is a wise business decision on Google's part.

Now all the censored masses have to do is find a usable proxy site. Just thought I would through that out and help them escape the censorship.