Google's Country-Specific Censorship Started

Blogger

Google stared censoring it's blogger blogs by country-specific. 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

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”. 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.