LikeTwitter, Google’s Blogger Starts a Censorship for Specific Countries

The censoring of the Blogger platform will happen through country-specific URLs called ccTLD (country-code top level domain). For example, in case certain blog’s content gets censored in your country (let’s make it Germany) you will be redirected from someblog.blogspot.com to someblog.blogspot.de

Soon Google’s blogging service will start to redirect users to these country-specific domain names in order to prevent them from using content that might be illegal in their countries. This technique doesn’t actually remove the content and blocks it only locally, so it is allegedly a better way to comply with some governments’ restrictions. There is also a way to pass around the redirection for awhile and see the intended page– by writing “ncr” ( “no country redirect”) after the domain, for example: someblog.blogspot.com/ncr

Although censorship by Google sounds really disturbing, have in mind that the content is not deleted in this way and can still be reached (at least outside the country), which is slightly better than simply shutting websites down. As Google reassures us: “Content removed due to a specific country’s law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD”.

The same policy was recently adopted by Twitter. Instead of removing tweets the company will only block them locally and will notify the users when the content is restricted with a “Tweet withheld” message.

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3. Hacking Google – Or how to make a decent search
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