Google has announced plans to filter content based on requests from each country. We look at the 10 big facts of this story.
1) Google's content filtering measure by having country specific mirrors is limited only to its Blogging platform.
2) Google Search, Orkut and Google Plus remain unaffected by this measure.
3) The announcement comes on the heels of Twitter's announcement that it now has the technology to selectively block tweets by country.
4) The move comes weeks after the Delhi High Court had threatened Google and Facebook with China like bans if they refused to censor offensive content.
5) Google had tried to wash its hands off the situation saying it was just a search engine and could not be held responsible for content posted by others. With this move Google can claim to be doing what's under its control as this measure aims to address content hosted on Google's own blogging platform.
6) Google's silence on offensive websites featuring in its search results is likely to come under scrutiny in the coming days, as a large chunk of web traffic is driven by Google search.
7) Last month Google's Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora had expressed Google's inability to censor content based on requests from specific countries saying "You are asking not just censor the Web in India, you are asking to censor the entire world wide web. The web has no borders". With this move Google has, infact, facilitated censoring limited to certain geographies, thereby facilitating borders on the web.
8) With Google and Twitter announcing their measures for filtering content, the focus now shifts to Facebook and how it plans to address this area.
9) Minister of State for Information Technology Mr. Sachin Pilot had earlier downplayed Indian government's so called censorship, insisting the government just wanted people to have legal recourse in case they found some content objectionable and the government had no plans of censoring content by its own.
10) Google has already implemented this in India. People visiting blogname.blogspot.com from India will be automatically redirected to blogname.blogspot.in.
From : NDTV
