Google to Block Per-Country Blogger Blogs

Following the announcement last week from Twitter that they can now block specific Tweets on a per-country basis, Google have now announced a similar move with Blogger that allows specific blogs to be blocked for individual countries, while keeping them online and active in the rest of the world.

Google describes the move on their blog as happening because…

“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.”

This move comes just under a year after the beginning of the Arab Spring which began with the people taking to the streets of Egypt and protesting against the thirty year rule of President Hosni Mubarak in which social networks such as Twitter were used extensively.  Similar uprisings quickly spread to neighbouring countries with Syria now the target of sanctions discussions at the United Nations.

It also follows Google’s discussions with China last year which saw the company temporarily withdraw from the country, only to return later having made concessions to the Chinese government.  Currently the changes apply only to Australia, New Zealand and India though Google apparently plan to roll the new system out globally.  It does not appear however that this has been introduced at the request of any specific country or countries.

The move would allow both Twitter and Google to block access to specific web content at the request of a country’s government or court-order.  This could include specific words in the case of Twitter or the blogs of people who are seen as dissidents or criminals.

When Twitter announced their censorship move last week it was met with heavy criticism from freedom-of-speech campaigners, however the Blogger move is meeting so far with a more even response with the BBC reporting Joss Wright, a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute who told them “Google’s new approach to supporting country-level takedown requests in Blogger strikes a good balance between free speech, legality and practical issues for end users.  By allowing per-country takedown requests, Google can meet local laws without blocking content at a global level.”

In a statement the company said…

“If you visit a blog that does not correspond to your current location as determined by your IP address, the blogspot servers will redirect you to the domain associated with your country.”

Google believe the move will allow them to comply with local laws while keeping the content online around the world.  It is not yet clear however how this and the Twitter system might work with privacy browsers intended to bypass local filtering.  These are used by dissidents and political activists in countries including China, Burma and North Korea.

In the past Google have blocked specific content from their search engine in China, and blocked other content such as Nazi-related websites in Germany where such things are illegal.  Many people however believe that the Internet should not be filtered at all, and arguments are certain to continue over these moves.

Blogspot To Start Redirecting To Country Specific Domain Extensions

Users of Google’s blog hosting service Blogger may notice quite a significant change in the coming weeks. Instead of being able to access blogs hosted on Blogger directly, they may now be redirected to a country specific domain. A user visiting a blog from Australia for instance will be redirected to blogspot.com.au automatically whenever a blogspot blog is accessed.

Only custom hosted domains are exempt from the change. Why is Google doing this? According to a recently added help page to “continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law”. Google explains the move with greater content removal flexibility as they can now manage those removals on a per country base to limit the “impact to the smallest number of readers” as content removed “due to a specific country’s law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD”.

The company notes that users who want to visit the original domain name can do so by accessing blogspost.com/ncr for that. It is not clear if this can also be attached to deep links, or if it only works to access the root domain of a particular blog.

It is definitely a confusing move both from a webmaster and site visitor perspective. Especially site regulars may think that something’s not right with the site if they are redirected automatically. Some may even believe that they are redirected by a hacked site or computer virus.

What’s your take on this development? Lets discuss it in the comments. (via Techdows)

It is also not clear if users who are locked out of the country domain can access the ncr version of the site, or if they are blocked from accessing that version as well. It is however likely that Google will first check the country of origin before making the redirect, which would suggest that users would be blocked from accessing ncr versions if the blog is blocked in their country.

Blog owners on the other hand may fear that the change will impact their search engine rankings or visibility. Google will make use of the rel”canonical” tag to prevent search engines from indexing different country versions of the same blog or post. It is however still possible that some webmasters will notice negative effects of the change.