Google vs. censorship

Tuesday's New York Times editorial about Google's Transparency Report service really resonated with me in the context of our class discussions. Google Transparency Report has two components: Government Requests and Traffic. Governments Requests tracks requests that Google receives from governments "for the removal of content or the disclosure of user data," while Traffic shows "whether or not [Google] services are accessible in a given country at a given time." A few key excerpts from the Traffic FAQ page (emphasis mine):

We believe that this raw data will give people insight into whether or not our services are accessible in a given country at a given time. Historically, information like this has not been broadly available. We hope this tool will be helpful in studies about service outages and disruptions and that other companies will make similar disclosures.

Interruptions in our services can have several different causes, ranging from network outages to government-mandated blocks. When the service is inaccessible for an extended period of time (beyond what is standard for a network outage), we investigate and draw conclusions based on the number of users affected and information we receive from local ISPs.

Not only is Google exposing repressive governments, it is also using its position as uncontested market leader to encourage other companies to do the same. I expect that moving forward, we're going to see some very interesting mash-ups from nonprofits, activists and scholars using this real-time map of digital oppression. Sergey Brin, one of the co-founders of Google, came to US at the age of 6 as a refugee from the USSR, and is deeply committed to human rights, freedom of speech, and internet freedom. He is also, by virtue of his position at Google, among the most powerful people in the world and certainly in the IC field. In that sense, he is a bit of an anti-Murdoch, choosing to use his considerable powers for good rather than for evil (I am revealing my biases here). Born in 1973, Brin is only 37 years old, and is definitely a big player in IC to keep an eye on.

Another interesting point is that Google does not permit hate speech in Blogger (see the Terms of Service). If Google receives a complaint about hate speech on a Blogger-hosted site, and deems the content to, in fact, be hate speech, the company takes the offending content down. There are a number of other restrictions, including prohibitions on child pornography, violence, crude content, copyright violations, distribution of malware, spam and illegal activities. Interestingly, Google frames its "content boundaries" as a necessary measure to preserve freedom of speech. As we discussed in class on Tuesday, this is the same reasoning behind the voluntary rating systems implemented by the film and broadcasting industries in the United States. It is also interesting to note that Google permits adult content on blogger, but requires it to be labeled as such so that it can be filtered out by parental control software.