Google reports 'alarming' rise in censorship by governments...

There has been an alarming rise in the number of times governments attempted to censor the internet in last six months, according to a report from Google.

Since the search engine last published its bi-annual transparency report, it said it had seen a troubling increase in requests to remove political content. Many of these requests came from western democracies not typically associated with censorship.

It said Spanish regulators asked Google to remove 270 links to blogs and newspaper articles critical of public figures. It did not comply. In Poland, it was asked to remove an article critical of the Polish agency for enterprise development and eight other results that linked to the article. Again, the company did not comply.

Google was asked by Canadian officials to remove a YouTube video of a citizen urinating on his passport and flushing it down the toilet. It refused. Full story...

Related posts:

1. Governments pose greatest threat to internet, says Google's Eric Schmidt...
2. Hacking group Anonymous takes on India internet 'censorship'
3. The Perfect Storm of internet censorship...
4. France on the verge of becoming "an enemy of the internet"
5. How Asian govts try to strangle the Internet...
6. Gagging us softly: free speech under threat in the West...
7. European Union ‘asking Google to censor web’
8. Google, Facebook remove content in India. WTF!