Sunday, April 25, 2010

A Note About Censorship

By R.B. Moreno

A blog post from Google last week probably explains why I've had trouble updating my own blog as of late. More from Monday's Washington Post:
This morning, on their main blog, Google posted a little reminder to everyone about its view on censorship on the web. Specifically, they don't like it. And while we all know their take on China's demand for censorship by now, the search giant also offered up a new interesting little factoid: of the 100 countries around the world in which Google offers their services, some 25 at least partially block them ... They also link to a list from the Open Net Initiative which shows countries around the world known to censor some web content. All told, there are some 40 countries today that censor the web in some way, according to this data. This is up from just four countries in 2002, according to Google. This is all interesting, but it would be much more effective if Google would specifically name names of the countries doing the full or partial blocking of its services, as they have so vocally done with China.
Based on two recent visits to Internet cafes outside Bishkek, it seems that Kyrgyzstan, for the time being, numbers among Google's 25.

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