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Countries such as China are slowly beginning to allow outside Internet influences to establish a presence within the nation’s borders. The price of admission, however, is one of heavy censorship and government regulation.

In the United States, we often take for granted the freedom we have to navigate the Internet at our leisure. The roads of the information superhighway are wide with nary a roadblock.

This freedom, however, doesn’t come standard in some other parts of the world.

Take China, for example -- a country renowned for its stringent guidelines regarding Internet censorship. The government’s posture of informational control has presented quite the stumbling block for outside companies looking to tap into the Chinese marketplace.

Google has been one of the more prominent companies affected by Interent censorship abroad. Philipp Lenssen over at Google Blogoscoped takes a look at how the company is addressing the idea of censorship, and how it’s going about the process to acquiesce to the wishes of nations that wish to closely monitor online content:

For the scope of this FAQ I’ll define censorship as missing results which are filtered for reasons of politics or regulations, not because they’re spam, non-family friendly, or copyright-infringements (though your mileage may vary).

So it seems right away that the idea of censorship, at least in Google’s eyes, is not an issue of morality, value, or even lawfulness -- but rather is an extension of a particular nation’s political ideology. Basically, Google is saying that it censors search results for no other reason than to satiate the wishes of a particular government.

It seems pretty straight forward, but then I come across this puzzling statement:

Google also sometimes removes sites if they are infringing on copyright (someone can send a DMCA – Digital Millennium Copyright Act – complain to Google), or infringing on Google’s webmaster guidelines (e.g. if a site includes hidden keywords visible only to the searchbot, but not users).

Are we still talking about censorship here? Didn’t Google just say that it doesn’t censor results based on spammy content or copyright infringements? I’m not insinuating that Google doesn’t have the right to deny a site’s inclusion based on these criteria, not in the least. It just seems somewhat irrelevant to the conversation regarding censorship, as Google has already stated that these items are not inherently pertinent to the methodology employed in content censorship.

Next we come to everyone’s favorite topic – adult content:

If you have Google’s SafeSearch enabled, Google may also not show certain sites containing adult content (note that in some countries, the user cannot toggle a SafeSearch option in the preferences). Additionally, Google may show up warning pages before delivering certain content, which happens on YouTube or Blogspot blogs.

Also, Google does usually not allow explicit adult content on any of the hosting solutions they provide (e.g. YouTube, Blogger). And then, Google sometimes removes adult content from its Google Zeitgeist report as well as its Google Suggest feature.

Again, Google seems to be backtracking on its claim that content is only filtered for “reasons of politics and regulations” and not “because they’re spam, non-family friendly or copyright infringements.”

Philipp has a rather lengthy write-up on the Google Censorship FAQ, albeit an unofficial commentary. Even still, I suggest giving it a read for yourself and see if you can make heads or tails of it all. It seems to be laden with a bit of double-talk, if you ask me.

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